Maybe it's the "computer scienciness" of the term. I'm a practical programmer with a tiny bit of industry experience, and have only just started attending university. And I'm intimidated by it all. Memory allocation! Pointers! My brain shuts down and I imagine anything I say will put McCarthy in the grave and cause Dijkstra to rise from it.
But the first time I read some blogger ragging on interviewees who didn't know how to reverse a linked list, I read the first sentence of the wikipedia article and realized it would be easy to do (albeit probably not elegantly): just loop over the list doing push/pop operations.
It's a pretty easy solution, and already runs in O(n) time, so I'm not sure why I doubt myself. It's probably that although I'm used to devising solutions for complex problems, I'm unused to problems that are formally defined.
I think that sounds like probably a big component. I do know what you mean -- something about the words "linked list" seems complicated, even though there's nothing much simpler than an actual linked list.
I wonder if people who would freeze at a question about reversing a linked list could answer that and similar questions if they were turned into "word problems" somehow; e.g. evilduck in another comment compared it to reversing the order of charms on a bracelet. Although I can't think of any examples that doesn't sound terribly contrived.
But the first time I read some blogger ragging on interviewees who didn't know how to reverse a linked list, I read the first sentence of the wikipedia article and realized it would be easy to do (albeit probably not elegantly): just loop over the list doing push/pop operations.
It's a pretty easy solution, and already runs in O(n) time, so I'm not sure why I doubt myself. It's probably that although I'm used to devising solutions for complex problems, I'm unused to problems that are formally defined.