Whether it's an excessive amount or not clearly depends on the person, isn't it? I studied for about 2 months and still didn't get an offer. http://news.ycombi

Whether it's an excessive amount or not clearly depends on the person, isn't it? I studied for about 2 months and still didn't get an offer. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4704039 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4704039 I don't know if preparing more would've made a difference, but it's possible (though personally I don't regret not having studied more, it simply wasn't worth beyond that point). Below you mention FizzBuzz. My phone screen question was about implementing a simple, concurrent data structure that could hold a fixed number of items. Not a big deal, but still significantly harder than FizzBuzz, in the sense that pretty much everyone that gets the data structure question right would also be able to solve FizzBuzz, while the converse is not true. > The reason Google has a reputation for hard interview problems is that before they came around, the standard technical interview was "So, $NAME, tell me about what you did at your last job". FWIW, This is essentially how Japanese companies still interview. I have never been asked an actual coding or algorithmic question by Japanese companies.