[niemyjski]

Completely agree with all of your points. I think I'd do horrible in most on the spot interviews, but give me an ide with intellisense and a book of advanced algorithms and I'll complete what ever you want. I understand the most common algorithms but I don't use them hardly ever in all the work I have done over the past 10 years. Am I implementing a big data search engine, no. So why would I know all the specifics to that, but given an hour or two of reading I'd be up to speed and be on top of things.

[odonnellryan]

Yeah. I think teaching students algo at college does one thing really well: It helps them understand runtime in association with the data structures they will use.

Gives you an intuition of the proper way to implement something before you know the big picture.

This isn't what interviews are testing: they are testing if you can implement the algo. That is rarely important.