[southphillyman]

My take away from this is that the bar may have been lower in 2008 when the headcount was lower than it is now despite the headcount having exploded recently. You still get the in-depth system design questions and "tech trivia" that requires a review of the spec for whatever language/technology you interview on, but the algo questions are harder now. Finding the unique set and implementing a binary tree would be "lay up" questions now to most prepared candidates. At the very least those caliber of questions have limited ambiguity and don't require knowledge of any tricks to get optimal solutions.