[BJanecke]

There is nothing about learning how basic data structures and algorithms work that won't help you in your day to day development.

You might be "fine" without it in a certain category of job, but rather than be dismissive about it you could be excited about having a massive wealth of information that you can use to do your job better.

There will always be something else to learn, wether it be how to apply Domain Driven Design to your work or how to work with graphs when munging data. It's always worth it.

[edit] Run on sentence

[octorian]

> There is nothing about learning how basic data structures and algorithms work that won't help you in your day to day development.

Having a basic understanding of these things is NOT the same as being able to regurgitate them on a whiteboard, under the stress of the interview process.

[LandR]

Exactly, I don't need to know this stuff of the top of my head. I can look it up...

[lordCarbonFiber]

The reason we test for things is to verify you have enough domain knowledge to "look it up". A bad interviewer will ask you to write quick sort on the board, because if we've already gotten to the point of "implement quick sort" yeah we can just look that up. However, if you're given a collection of nodes and asked to do something with them; that's a bit more interesting. If you know nothing about graph traversal, or have never seen a tree (both not uncommon in people claiming to be principle engineers in my industry) how do you even know what to search for? Best case is you're smart and waste time coming up with a new solution from first principles; most likely it just never gets done.