[robmaister]

From my experience (graudated in 2016), most interviewing is centered around algorithmic complexity or at least regurgitating logarithmic complexity algos.

Potential hires still in or just out of school should have no problem answering those questions, but a few years out and most people forget those skills since most of the time the answer is to use an existing implementation or find a way to avoid the problem entirely. All of the people I know with a 4-year CS degree learned all about that stuff in their data structures/intro to algo classes.

I work in games and have had to both implement a few data structures on my own (mainly specialized trees and graphs). I've seen them help performance a ton and I've also had to scrap one or two of them because the naive implementation was faster. Nowadays a lot of indirection means your processor is spending most of it's time waiting on memory reads, while flat arrays can be loaded into CPU caches a lot more efficiently.