[jasonkester]

It's a tough reality, but yes. Memorizing trivia is a useful skill to get past first-tier tech interviews at large firms.

As a developer, you have a few options. First, you can recognize this reality and simply spend the necessary time cramming useless algorithms for a few weeks before you go off interviewing.

Or you can declare all this stupidity as beneath you, go in to your Google interview cold, and get rejected based on trivia even though you're genuinely smart and good at what you do.

Or, you can spend your first several years building impressive artifacts and creating relationships that you can leverage when the time comes to bypass the entire Tech Interview/Resume Filter/HR step of the hiring process and skip straight to the part where you're having coffee with the guy with hiring authority.

I've personally landed every gig I've had in the last 15 years using that last trick. Which is a good thing, since despite having made a lot of software companies a lot of money, I can't recite so much as Bubble Sort on demand.