Algorithms Interviews: Theory vs. Practice
What&#x27;s even more interesting is the new meta-game around interviews.<p>Algorithmic questions started with Microsoft, who wanted to make sure engineering hires could... program!<p>The point was to make it as language agnostic as possible and friendly to college hires (since everyone who did a serious CS program did algorithms, there was a common vocabulary). You weren&#x27;t even meant to study intensively for these, just brush up on your algo class.<p>But now I keep seeing guides on the internet about &quot;hacking the coding interview&quot; and special &quot;prep material&quot; pushed by influencers (???) on YouTube that claim to be ex FAANG (hard to check). Apparently there&#x27;s even classes taught at tier two colleges (Waterlo if I recall) that specifically focus on algorithm interviews. Not algorithms, just algorithms interviews. They get interview questions from students and the class is just memorizing as many of them as possible.