<story><title>Hacking a Google Interview (2009)</title><url>http://courses.csail.mit.edu/iap/interview/index.php</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>csnewb</author><text>All I do at work is fix bugs by changing a few lines of code and glue together API&amp;#x27;s to send data from A to B. I don&amp;#x27;t regularly search BST&amp;#x27;s using DFS&amp;#x2F;BFS algorithms or find the kth shortest string in a merged unsorted linked list or some shit like that. Preparing for these technical interviews is like a part-time job after my full-time job.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>somethingsimple</author><text>I understand what you&amp;#x27;re saying and I generally agree that algorithmic&amp;#x2F;coding interviews are broken. But you know what? Sometimes you need the fancy stuff.&lt;p&gt;I once stumbled upon a problem at work that, after some thinking, I realized could be modeled as a graph problem and solved by performing a topological sort. It was a good and elegant solution to the problem. But what if it hadn&amp;#x27;t landed on my plate, and instead on someone who didn&amp;#x27;t know a thing about graphs? The problem might not have been solved (which would mean great pain for our customers, since it was on a feature that customers directly interfaced with), or worse, someone else might have turned up with a horribly messy, spaghetti-like solution.&lt;p&gt;So I think companies should actually hire people who know their CS fundamentals, even if 80% of the time they&amp;#x27;ll be doing trivial work that someone less qualified could do. What matters though is having people that are ready for the hairy stuff when it comes up.</text></comment>
<story><title>Hacking a Google Interview (2009)</title><url>http://courses.csail.mit.edu/iap/interview/index.php</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>csnewb</author><text>All I do at work is fix bugs by changing a few lines of code and glue together API&amp;#x27;s to send data from A to B. I don&amp;#x27;t regularly search BST&amp;#x27;s using DFS&amp;#x2F;BFS algorithms or find the kth shortest string in a merged unsorted linked list or some shit like that. Preparing for these technical interviews is like a part-time job after my full-time job.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>scarmig</author><text>If it makes you feel any better, changing a few lines of code and glueing together APIs to send data from A to B is what 80% of Google engineers do each day too.</text></comment>