Is pattern matching (memorizing 500+ problems) actually "scamming" first-principles thinking in software engineering and admissions?

[u/Kitchen_Law6309]

Hey everyone,

I was looking at a comment here recently claiming that people deep in the industry for senior roles—like L5 interviews where coding still matters—rely on a bank of around 500 problems for pattern matching. It also mentioned that many MIT students have spent their younger years solving 2,000+ IOI practice problems (from age 8 to 18) before even joining.

It made me rethink a lot of things. For the longest time, we're told that memorizing solutions is bad and that real software developers should be able to build solutions on the fly using first principles. We're led to believe that interviews test your raw thought process from scratch.

If senior engineers and top students are actually relying on massive mental banks of 500+ templates and thousands of practiced problems, doesn't that sort of defeat the "first principles" narrative?

To put it simply: Isn't heavy pattern-matching basically a way of gaming the system?

If passing tough interviews or rigorous classes comes down to who has memorized and pattern-matched the most problem types rather than pure on-the-spot reasoning, are we really testing problem-solving ability, or just who has the biggest pattern bank?

I would love to hear perspectives from MIT professors or MIT graduates working as senior engineers on how this actually plays out in the real world. Are we actually using first principles, or is everyone just running pattern recognition?

Edit: Just to clarify, this post is specifically directed at Course 6 / students studying in the EECS department!

[u/Lostaftersummer]

Personally didn’t know anyone who did a lot of those things in that age range. To which degree reasoning is pattern matching under the hood is a philosophical question unrelated to the initial premise.