[slily]

I can relate to the comment on interviews. When I was in school it was easy to apply what I'd learned throughout the semester to the exam questions... but in interviews, I'll be asked to solve problems that I've never dealt with, without a reference. My first instinct with any problem that's new to me is to find the state of the art, but obviously that's not possible in that case, so I'll think of a solution, then immediately doubt its optimality and rethink it... then repeat that once or twice and sometimes I'll end up with the same answer that I came up with initially, or I'll just doubt my ability and give an ambivalent or unconfident answer, especially if I feel like I'm making the interviewer wait. I'm sure I sound like an idiot to them every time I'm asked to solve a silly problem like that.

[nicoburns]

I usually go, “I’m reality I’d spend a couple of hours researching the best solution to this before starting, but seeing as I can’t d that here…”

And then proceed with my non-optimal solution. They often don’t care about optimality at all. I’ve passed interviews by implementing a bubble sort before. And I have no shame in doing so. I’ve never needed to implement a sort in an actual job, and if I did need to I would be looking up how to do it.