[Kephael]

I can't think of a single reputable company that I would be interested in working at in a SDE role where they do not conduct data structure and algorithm intensive interviews. If you want to work at a brand name company as a developer today, you must be able to solve these interview questions.

[jaimebuelta]

My main problem with this is the fact that, at certain point, your previous experience gets somehow irrelevant.

Have you been able to solve difficult technical problem in the last 5 years, which you can explain in detail? It doesn't matter unless you can code me from scratch a binary tree. Do you have domain experience about something the company work? Cool story, but tell me the proper API call to do this obscure operation.

I understand what's the point of that, I made technical interviews myself and I know is the game to play, but at some point it feel a little weird that you cannot leverage your previous experience and go talk the interesting, actually relevant parts, not the big O of quick sort algorithm...

After playing the game N times (and I don't think I'm particularly bad at it), it gets a little tiresome, I have to say...

[yarou]

I tend to agree with this sentiment. As my colleague aptly put, algorithms/data structure questions aren't really about whether a potential candidate can perform the job.

It's more about whether or not they are "one of us". I mean, if you couldn't be bothered to brush up on CS fundamentals, how can I trust you with the responsibilities that the job entails? That looks like a red flag to me.

FWIW, when I interview people, I ask actual problems I've run into, i.e. design and implement a sane concurrency system that's easy to reason about on an embedded platform with limited resources.