[sanderjd]

Right, and my point is that interview questions don't actually tend to be of the form, "write me a good hashtable implementation from scratch". They do tend to prod whether people can take advantage of the trade-offs between the properties of maps vs. lists.

My point is that there is plenty to complain about - unrealistic time pressure, writing on a whiteboard, only testing coding when that is the least interesting part of a senior developer's job, no opportunity to test and debug, etc. - that it isn't necessary to bring up these exaggerated boogeymen about how everyone is asking for novel algorithms on-the-spot.

[int_19h]

I've seen plenty of interview questions that do boil down to "implement this algorithm" or "implement this data structure". There are similar examples in comments on this very discussion.