I live in a bubble in San Francisco and post on HN, so when talking to people I usually assume (perhaps incorrectly), that they are all software engineers between the ages of 18-25 currently in the job market, interviewing at all the same hip 5 companies, so I apologize :P .

In software engineer, when applying for jobs at tech companies, you are universally asked to program solutions to algorithms problems on a whiteboard that follow a very specific formula. If you ever interview for a software position, you will get these exact kinds of questions.

Such questions are usually things like:

"Given a N sorted lists of numbers, join the lists into a single sorted list efficiently"

"Implement a Stack which has push, pop, and minimum operations in O(1)"

"Traverse a Tree and print out each item in level by level order" ect

They are all very formulaic and similar. In the last 3 years I've done about 100 algorithms interviews, and 9 out of 10 times it is a question I've been asked before.

You can find other examples at Glassdoor, hacker rank, or project Euler.

http://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/Google-Interview-Question...

https://projecteuler.net/