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I love that one. I now regularly use "invert a binary tree" as a proxy joke for "let's grill you at a whiteboard with algorithmic puzzles that we never use in practice here but they make a great reason for us to belittle and laugh at you for not being desperate enough to drill these kind of questions for months before coming here"

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This is the thing that always confuses me. Google is a company that we all associate with a fairly high quality of technical work, and yet they still appear to use as interview questions what we'd all consider to be really poor proxies for on-the-job performance. I can't seem to reconcile those two things.

That's easy enough: Google is sufficiently big and well known that even if they have an alarmingly high false negative rate, they will never run out applicants, and "weeding out" even a lot of high quality applicants doesn't substantially reduce the average competence of the remaining pool. And the company is big enough that it can absorb the occasional false positive as well, especially when it comes to people who know their algorithms but not, say, how to work on a team effectively.

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