[ramraj07]

Thanks. Unfortunately this is not the case always. I explicitly start interviews telling I'm not academically trained in CS even though I've been practically coding for decades, and I tell them if they ask some "in paper" CS question, I might not answer well. People still ask me to do merge sort - which frankly isn't even in theory that hard - but I think I've subconsciously refused to learn a sorting algorithm just so I can answer a stupid interview question (the day I need to optimize a sorting problem myself I'll learn it hopefully). Whenever the person still insists on asking this without any help, he also comes off as a douche who can only see in black and white.

Should I suck it up and learn these things to do better in interviews? Maybe. But thankfully this handicap became a nice filter and I'm in a nice job where people value real experience and "getting things done" more than linked lists and merge sort, so won't need to worry about dealing with these folk for a long time hopefully.

[valtism]

This is why I'm not going to apply for Google any time soon. Their entire hiring process seems to revolve around how much CS trivia you memorised at school.

[mark-r]

Merge sort is incredibly practical though, any time you have to sort a data set that doesn't all fit in memory at once. I've used it a couple of times. As you say, it's not that hard.