[btilly]

He undermines his own point by pointing to dictionaries as an example of something that uses trees. Which suggests that he doesn't know that dictionaries in most languages are implemented as hashes, and hashes are NOT based on trees!

The truth is that interviews should test the skills your job actually requires. For a variety of skills outside of that core, it is valuable to have someone on your team who understands it for other people to go to. But if you're not doing algorithms all the time, you don't need or want everyone to have mastered that.

And I say this as someone who knows algorithms well enough to pass his interview.