[jplasmeier]

Of course. For example, many of the questions for technical interviews involve knowing which data structure to use in a given setting, and applying it to find a solution.

The interviewee is more than welcome to study data structures and interview questions about data structures. A poor student will just memorize questions and answers by rote without really understanding the data structure in question. The good student will actually learn and understand data structures in the context of the solution.

One would hope that interviewers are able to ask follow-up questions about the solution which distinguish between the two.

EDIT: During the best tech interview I have done, I had no idea how to solve the question asked (that is, I had not studied its solution despite this being a relatively common question). I was able to ask articulate questions and invoked understanding of data structures as I went along. Memorizing solutions is a game of luck, and not recommendable.

[nissimk]

Bullsh*t. Seriously, these questions are all tricks. If you memorize the tricks you can win the game. Even the "really easy" questions like reverse a string involve a trick -- swapping from the ends and stopping in the middle. The interview game involves memorizing tricks and identifying which memorized trick applies to the question.

[sirbearington]

I feel like 90% of writing software is identifying which "trick" applies to the problem you're trying to solve and applying it correctly.

[nissimk]

Yeah, but you can look them up.

[xamuel]

The thing about looking up tricks is you can only look them up if you remember they even exist to look up.

[glangdale]

This assumes the trick is easily-indexed-by-name and can be looked up - so you have to know it exists. A lot of the better tricks are more like 'frameworks' whether specific ("Four Russians", "prefix sum") or general ("dynamic programming", "branch-and-bound").

There's a limit to how far you can get just Googling stuff ("how do I reverse a string") for recipe-book solutions to things. I think practically everything in Computer Science could be Googled ("how does merge sort work", "what is an inclusive vs exclusive cache") at some level but this doesn't mean one shouldn't know a great deal of it. At least, if you want one of these jobs...

[employee8000]

And yet most people are memorizing solutions to hundreds of different questions and getting great jobs because of it. I know this because I have several friends who do this.

[sjg007]

Well, at least hope that some of that information sticks.