[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...