[vonmoltke]

> Having said all of this, without going into specific implementation details, hash tables and linked lists are incredibly simple and I see no reason why anyone calling themselves a programmer would have trouble with these. I mean, I wouldn't expect you to be able to write a good hash function or anything, but explaining the basic concept shouldn't be too hard for most programmers. If someone is self-taught, then ok maybe they haven't ever needed to learn this. Its definitely possible, but I would at least hope they would know basic performance characteristics or at least some rules of thumb as to when to use what data structure. Hopefully based on logic and not just hearsay ;-)

That's why I was trying to establish what "roughly" means. This sounds like a reasonable definition.