The problem with this thinking is this "aptitude" is something which comes naturally. I was drilled with this "aptitude" nonsense when I was a student where the teachers would say that if a person "gets" a problem and finds a solution then he is a natural for the subject.
In my practical experience I find that to get the "aptitude" requires a lot of effort put in it. It definitely would vary depending on the person and his experiences but practicing it is very important to go forward.
Yeah right. Tell me the last time you built your own red-black tree in real actual code at work. Or did a sort by any other means than tacking “order by” on the end of a query.
They are a test of how recently you crammed for your CS finals, that’s all.
Or how much effort you're willing to put into prepping for interviewing and getting a new job. It definitely filters against the casual looker.
Which, to some extent, makes sense. You're basically filtering out people who won't put in the effort to get the job. Whether or not those who put in the extra effort are actually going to be better employees is a different decision.
There are languages - C and Go, and to a lesser extent, C++ - in which re-implementation of data structures and algorithms is not uncommon.
To your larger point, data structures and algorithms are popular in interviews for the same reason Project Euler is popular - it is very easy to ask a well defined, but interesting question about core CS or math.
Indeed. If the job was implementing algorithms on bare metal then bring it on! That job sounds like a lot of fun!
But those kinds of questions make zero sense and have zero value if the job is actually implementing CRUD apps in a high level language. You might as well quiz candidates on their assembly language skills too, for a Python job...
In my practical experience I find that to get the "aptitude" requires a lot of effort put in it. It definitely would vary depending on the person and his experiences but practicing it is very important to go forward.