I wish that it were more like you&#x27;ve described here, but unfortunately, my experience is that the interviews will be very challenging, that you will need to know data structures very well, and that it really won&#x27;t be enough to talk generally about these things.  It might not even be enough to talk generally in a way that shows you understand how to use a data structure to solve a problem and sketch out a bit of code.  It depends on the company, but to get an offer, you may need to write more or less accurate code at a whiteboard that solves a problem efficiently.  Some minor syntax errors aren&#x27;t a big deal, but overall, the code will need to be pretty tight and be close to working.  Again, this is in my experience (I have interviewed at amazon and google, as well as smaller startups that seem to do the same thing).<p>I&#x27;d highly recommend &quot;cracking the coding interview&quot;, and make sure you can handle even the moderate to difficult problems in about an hour at a whiteboard.  Before you go to that, though, go back to your data structures and algorithms book and make sure you can do basic list, stack, queue, binary tree, hash, and binary operations.  In other words, you should be able to build and print a linked list or binary search tree without much thought - if you can&#x27;t do this, there&#x27;s no way you&#x27;ll be able to solve unanticipated whiteboard problems that use linked lists, trees, or other core data structures in a more elaborate way.<p>Your experience will be worth more than your degree, eventually, but you probably will still need to pass the technical interview&#x2F;exams when you change jobs, even at more senior technical levels.<p>I&#x27;m not saying this is good, just saying this is how it is.