[krzyk]

> I view basic tree traversal as table stakes for a developer with more than a year or two of experience (IIRC, it's discussed in Intro to Algorithms in most CS curricula).

You mix two completely irrelevant things: education and experience.

You will be taught binary trees in CS, but not every programmer is studying that.

If you learn binary trees in CS, you will forget it after few years of experience, because skills that are not used are forgotten.

So yeah, Amazon/Googles of the world are looking mostly at recent CS graduates (most of the set of programmers that know many algos) and the very small set of programmers that deal with algos every day.

[GFischer]

And a third category: people that train specifically to pass the Amazon and Google exam.

I know several people that did, taking several months off to prepare (and got in), and yes, you have to re-learn all the CS algorithms which will probably be irrelevant again after you pass the interview.