[QuadmasterXLII]

As someone who is good at technical interviews, I am really confused by the assertion that they are checking if you have memorized the solution. In my experience, the problems have been either A) easy and I’ve never seen them before, where the goal is genuinely to solve it on the spot (“write a function to validate what a sequence of moves is a legal tic-tac-toe game”), or B) impossible to solve on the spot but I have the answer memorized because I’ve solved the problem many times in the past as part of the experience listed on my resume (“Dump a valid PyTorch training script for a simple MLP from your memory without consulting documentation” “Here is an obscure CMAKE error, explain what discontinuation caused it”)

How common in practice are these questions like “find the median of a list of sorted lists” that are both too obscure to get memorized in the course of day to day work, yet common enough that you could, if you wanted to waste time, memorize the solutions to all of them?

[arp242]

Part of the problem is not just the questions themselves, but that you're asked to solve them under time pressure, with a bunch of people watching.

I've had trouble with "write a function to remove duplicates from an array without losing order". This is fairly trivial and I can write this with my eyes closed, but if you're so nervous that you can barely think straight ... yeah, then it gets tricky.

I have lots of anecdotes of stuff I failed during interviews that know I can do because I've literally done it before or since. I'm one of those senior developers who failed to write a for loop during interviews.