Not necessarily easier, but definitely less ambiguous. To be honest, in terms of absolute difficulty, I'd say that interview problems have I had to implement quicksort. Only in interview problems have I had to create a new data structure to fit a problem. On the other hand, I've always been able to suss out the requirements for the solution in one or two questions in interviews. In real life, figuring out what the solution should even look like is often a process that takes at least a week.