> I think the assignments were completely fair examples of what I might experience on daily basis.
In my experience, you have a lot more than an hour to do it in the real job. And while perhaps 1% of SW folks will deal with in on a daily basis, most will not. I certainly have gone years without needing to use graph algorithms (including even DFS/BFS). And I've needed a BST only once in a decade - and I didn't need to code it, just needed to understand the data structure and complexity to know that "binary_search" in C++ was a superior option than using a map for my use case (even though the complexity is the same).
Some context: At work I recently solved a problem where I had to build a graph (DAG), and do some queries on it mildly efficiently[1]. I did it quickly thanks to wasting time on Leetcode, but no one knew how quick, and people were impressed that I "got it done in less than a day". The reality in most SW work is that whether it takes you a day or an hour to solve this problem, the overall rate of progress will not be impacted.
[1] Mildly efficiently because for the first POC pass, I didn't memoize, and then I got lazy and decided I'd optimize it only after getting a real world data set and seeing if it was slow. It wasn't, even for a decently large data set. The reason? Business logic dictated that the max distance between two nodes did not exceed 8, so from a complexity stand point, you're not increasing the work N-fold by not memoizing, but it's just changing the constant factor.
Somehow, I suspect that in half of the FAANG interviews, had I coded this and argued that the complexity didn't change, I would not get a pass.[2]
[2] Not trying to be cynical: I did argue this for a different problem in a Google phone screen - I had been asked to write some code + data structures to handle an Manager/Report relationship, and the interviewer pointed out my data structure was less than optimal. I countered with "In most companies, the number of employees a manager has under him/her is usually bounded by a small number." Surprisingly, the interviewer gave in.