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It's a 100% pure lottery. I'd easily answer some of the questions, but for others I stand no chance without prep time. For example, I've re-learned implementing a self-balancing binary tree at least 3 times in the past, and I literally can't remember anything about it.

I've always found such questions lame, because (1) you rarely need this kind of thing, (2) when you actually do, you can find the information within 5 minutes, and (3) if you don't know it, well... you're not gonna suddenly come up with somebody's PhD thesis during a stressful job interview.

And you may say "yeah, they don't expect you to, they just want to see how you think". That's bullshit, because people know this questions come up often and will sit down and study them in order to game the interview process.




> "yeah, they don't expect you to, they just want to see how you think".

And companies explicitly send prep material now. When I interviewed for Amazon, I got a whole pile of links to study.




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