Maybe I've had a particularly depressing career, but 99% of it consisted of various ways of interacting with a database.
How? You have unlimited time to find the answer; it happens before you make any contact with the company at all.
Everyone inside Milo seemed to think that their hiring process was hugely better than what happened elsewhere, including by producing better hires. But the approach -- set a difficult challenge instead of an easy challenge, such that, if someone passes the challenge, you will almost certainly hire them -- still seems to be vanishingly rare.
However, there might have been external reasons. I was hired after they were acquired by eBay, and apparently they had preexisting approval for a certain number of hires that year that they didn't end up meeting. If you were earlier or later (pretty likely!), maybe they might not have been so cavalier.
I’m not complaining. Who knows? Getting rejected might have been for the best.
> I feel that saying "I would solve this problem with <algorithm>" should be good enough, and if I'm asked to implement it, I should be able to copy paste the Wikipedia pseudocode and start converting.
Long ago, milo.com posted a challenge to codeeval.com (both websites now dead) which turned out to be an example of the "assignment problem". That is, given a set X, another set Y, and a payoff function f(x,y), assign each element y in Y to exactly one element x in X such that the total payoff from all assignments is maximized.
I tried to solve it, realized I didn't know how, and was eventually able to look up the solution in a couple of papers. There is an algorithm called "the Hungarian algorithm" which will do it.
So I wrote up the Hungarian algorithm and sent it in. This was good enough to get a phone interview with the company.
I tried to prepare for the screen by going over the Hungarian algorithm to the point that I could myself give the proof that it correctly solved the problem. This was fun. But in the phone interview, it was barely mentioned at all. According to the interviewer, I passed that step by just mentioning the name "Hungarian algorithm".