[clarry]

> why do people make such a big deal about this?

You're arguing a point they didn't make.

The point they made is that most coders don't need to worry about algorithms on a daily basis, and that reflects poorly on them in interviews where they expect you to not-so-subtly fake your cleverness with "aha!" moments when you're being drilled on the fine details of complex algorithms that you maybe once needed to implement in the past 20 years. (On the rare occasion that these coders need to worry about algorithmic scaling, they will re-use an implementation from their fine standard library or adapt one from another source, without turning it into a brain exercise of reasoning about and building the whole algorithm from scratch on whiteboard while a bunch of strangers are sitting there judging and prompting you to explain your thought process as you go).

It's nothing to do with whether you have the fundamentals of basic algorithms down or whether you can select an appropriate algorithm for a real world problem.

[seanwilson]

> On the rare occasion that these coders need to worry about algorithmic scaling, they will re-use an implementation from their fine standard library or adapt one from another source, without turning it into a brain exercise of reasoning about and building the whole algorithm on scratch on whiteboard while a bunch of strangers are sitting there judging you and prompting you to explain your thought process as you go).

> It's nothing to do with whether you have the fundamentals of basic algorithms down or whether you can select an appropriate algorithm for a real world problem.

I never said they should be able e.g. code the algorithm from scratch on a whiteboard.

I'm saying you should be able to explain the basic principles of e.g. an array, a linked list, a hash table and a binary tree, and where each would be appropriate to use.

If you don't know these basic principles, I find it very unlikely you would know how to select library components or adapt algorithms that scaled to modest datasets.

[clarry]

> I'm saying you should be able to explain the basic principles of e.g. an array, a linked list, a hash table and a binary tree, and where each would be appropriate to use.

I think most of us agree with that. But that's beside the point, because that's not the algorithm-heavy interview people are complaining about big time.

[seanwilson]

It depends what you're describing as algorithm heavy. Do you have any examples?

I've seen people arguing you shouldn't have to know how a linked list, hash table or binary tree work. I think every programmer should know these ones. I think having to describe how quicksort works is getting too much, but knowing e.g. some search tree and graph algorithms might be appropriate depending on your domain.