[lk145]

I agree that these interview questions are going to be around for the foreseeable future, so people need to just learn them. But it's still a waste of time -- you have a limited amount of time to devote to learning new technology. You can either spend your time building a cool side project with interesting languages, frameworks, or technologies that are highly relevant to your work or you can use it to study algorithms you will never implement outside of an interview.

When faced with this dilemma in the past I have picked the interview prep because it's necessary, but I'd rather have been building cool stuff that actually helps me do my job better.