Yeah, same here - this "cramming for the Google interview" concept is strange. It's not like the interviewers asked lots of exotic trick questions; they were just making sure I understood CS fundamentals and knew how to solve problems. The interviews did add up to a solid, tiring day of engineering work, but it all seemed like reasonable stuff - they were questions about concepts anyone working at Google ought to be comfortable with.

And some people don't have to cram for there intro to data structures CS class.

Other people do though.

Perhaps you are one of those people who could just walk in and Ace the final exam for an intermediate data structures and algorithms class taught at colleges.

Not everyone goes to a top school or does competitive programming. The rest of us have to work at it.

It would be really interesting to do a study of Googlers and see how much time on average they spent preparing for the interview. Would also be interesting to compare that with average preparation of people who interviewed but didn't get the job.

And finally, it would be fascinating to plot career performance at Google vs time spent interviewing. Intuitively I would expect those who got an offer without studying to do better (higher latent intelligence), but I could also see it going the other way (lots of studying correlates with willingness to work hard on boring problems, which is what most Google engineers actually have to do day-to-day).

You are probably part of a really a small percentage.

Can you explain how you kept the algorithms/data structures knowledge in your head fresh enough to pass Google interview on the spot? Were you a fresh grad?