[smeyer]

But they want to find out about both kinds of knowledge, your sound judgement on problems and your ability to prepare designs by reasoning about data structures and such. If they only asked questions where the correct answer in production is to come up with a new design, they'd have to ask pretty difficult interview questions. Instead, they ask questions that are simpler and common enough to be implemented by libraries to test your design skills, and your ability to determine when to use off the shelf components should be tested somewhere else. It's quite common to ask more general questions about problem solving and evaluation to get at those sorts of things.

[brudgers]

It seems to me that data-structures are the wrong level of abstraction for software engineering positions that aren't using C or an equivalent portable assembly language.

In most situations what matters is datatypes, not data structures. That is, queues and stacks, are the important abstractions...and reversing a linked list in non-trivial cases means that:

~ Either a queue was used instead of a stack

~ or vice versa

~ or perhaps a dequeue should have been used.

Does it matter if an ordered bag is layed out in memory sequentially or with links until profiling justifies refactoring? And when you're in Java, refactoring largely going to be a matter of swapping out one set of library calls for another congruent set...and hopefully, all this happens behind an interface.

Using off the shelf components when it makes engineering sense is a hallmark of professionalism. Reinventing linked list functions is, in most situations, a indicator that a person needs close supervision.

[davelnewton]

I think this misses the point.