Comment by caethan

I've heard bitching about some of the interview questions our team asks before, but here's the thing: each of those questions is about a problem our team actually had to solve before, reformulated into an interview-style question. Yes, we've had to use Hamming distances, worry about the scaling (N log N vs N^2) of particular solutions, use error-correcting codes, interesting data structures and all of that. Is that most of the job? No, we do a lot of more boring stuff too, but the algorithms and data structures are definitely a part of it. I don't want someone who can only glue pieces together, developing novel tools to solve the problem is important too.