We ... had different experiences. It was a day of implementing algorithms on a whiteboard. I was supposed to be interviewing for a management position so I didn’t get the study packet either.
I also interviewed at google, in the in-person all of the algos I got were very fair in my opinion, in that it took a little bit of thought to figure out what I needed to do, and then after that, most of the work was just turning that idea into an algorithm. It was all on the whiteboard but I thought it was fair. They were fine with little errors and we talked through them.
On the phone interview I was asked how to something I had no idea how to do. I have no idea how I passed the phone interview.
Seems like a mixed bag, the question as far as I know is completely up to the interviewer, which makes the interview very subjective when they don't use a normal question.
Interesting. My interview process was one of the most negative interviewing experiences of my life. Two of the people interviewing me were mostly silent except when they were combative. One algorithm I implemented was essentially the internals of a popular vi clone and was dismissively told the algorithm wouldn’t work in practice. I also argued Big O with a another interviewer who said nothing except my value was wrong (it wasn’t).
