"I love reading the difficult interview questions that Facebook, Google, and other large technology companies are famous for."<p>This is when I knew I would not be able to relate to this article.
If your interview has traditional comp sci academic questions instead of practical then perhaps avoid that company (unless it is academia).<p>What they should be asking you is to show the most optimal way to reverse the array, which is to find a popular highly optimised library and use that, one that is also likely to be far less buggy.<p>Algorithmic implementation screams academic, practical implementation yells experience.
So, the challenge here is that these don't help be a better "programmer". However, they do stretch the mind which helps.<p>Unlike others, I love whiteboard code challenges. However, they really are a proxy to IQ which does correlate to job success. This works for big tech as they need more fundamentals especially if you hope to have any success climbing towards principal engineer.<p>Sadly, most jobs don't really need it and the reason is prices law. Applying the actual science in a real way is done by a handful of engineers in an org.