[throwaway_374]

So your ability in a pressured limited-time environment come up with an O(N) dynamic programming algorithm for a fictitious scenario is a testament to your ability as a software engineer versus a competitive programmer who can pattern match scenarios?

[mciancia]

But algo questions are usually just part of the interview, not the whole thing. And usually they are fairly simple, so every good software engineer should be able to solve them.

[throwaway_374]

Really, I've had an example of deriving (I didn't know what it was called at the time) Manacher's Palindromic substrings: http://www.geeksforgeeks.org/manachers-algorithm-linear-time...