I know this is google, and people there are smart, but there is a chance that you're overestimating the interviewer's ability to know quickly if you have these

I know this is google, and people there are smart, but there is a chance that you're overestimating the interviewer's ability to know quickly if you have these skills. If they're very unfamiliar with the problem space, they may lack confidence in their ability to interview you. On the other hand, if they know the answers in advance (or at least understand the problem very well), they'll be better able to gauge your performance. So they go with red-black trees. Not your skill or ability, as you pointed out, just your performance on some narrowly chosen questions from an area that the interviewer understands well in advance. I've thought about false negatives a lot, but you've raised a good point about the high risk of false positives in this sort of interview culture as well. I will grant that it isn't easy to study for and pass a data structures grilling that can last all day (or longer), even if you have studied for a month. Anyone who can do this is at least capable of writing and understanding fairly complicated code. But you are absolutely right that this may lead to "false positives" as well... they may simply be hiring people who are great at studying for and passing algorithms quizzes. This certainly doesn't mean they'll be successful. In fact... well, you've essentially pointed this out, but what does it say about a motivated and creative person that he or she will drop everything in order to study for something with only passing relevance to the number of projects he or she would like to be pursuing? Well, desperate, I suppose, could be one of the motivating factors. But how many top programmers are desperate? Many would be interested in working for google, but aren't desperate enough to put aside the interesting things they'd like to be working on in order to spend a month preparing for an exam on red-black trees. Maybe this article suggests google may be coming around to realizing that they are doing some harm to their hiring efforts with this approach to technical interviews?