[jkachmar]

Bullshit.

It has been my personal experience, and the experience of many people I’ve spoken with, that this kind of trivia is learned in order to get a job and then forgotten immediately afterwards because it’s useless.

Anecdotal example: a former colleague is an incredibly talented systems programmer and has had to study leetcode garbage for the last few months in order to feel qualified to interview for a position with a team that he had previously been on at an older employer.

As another commenter said elsewhere, these types of questions are used because they’re legal proxies for “IQ tests”, and because they filter for people who are willing to sacrifice much of their personal time for the sake of the company.

[biztos]

I don't think the knowledge is useless as much as it's properly abstracted away into core libraries for 99.999% of the real-world use-cases.

Maybe the questions started as "IQ tests" (or a proxy for "fresh out of a Stanford-like CS Program?") but my impression is that now it's a mild (or not) proxy for hazing.

"I suffered through this crap and by God you are going to suffer through it to, or you can't join my little club, and by the way I just make a hundred dollars telling you that."

Edit: clarity & speling

[jkachmar]

I think knowledge of the concepts is very useful, but precise recall of the algorithmic implementations is absolutely useless.

It’s very different for someone to have a solid grasp of, say, cache-aware programming techniques, algorithms and data structures that are necessary for low-latency architectural work, etc.

...but I’m aware of very few positions (if any???) that require the ability to arbitrarily synthesize that information on the spot.

EDIT: Originally meant to lead with the fact that I broadly agree with what you’re saying, I just wanted to clarify my original objection.

[tourist_on_road]

In this regard. I like the google approach for not asking questions that are publicly available on internet.

These are basic computer science fundamentals and critical thinking capabilities that essential for performing the job atleast for software development roles.