[kodah]

The DS/A stuff that's taught in schools as well as math aids a lot in leetcode style interviews. Consider that material to be a very large hill to climb to understand solving these problems in a time-boxed manner. Additionally, most of the time these problems have nothing to do with your day to day work - which begs the question: why do they exist in the first place?

[lapsedacademic]

I'm in an awkward situation because I'm in R&D, so every job I've had uses DS/A style stuff intensely every day. The engineers I hire are mostly there to help me with my work, so they need the DS/A style stuff. I don't really care about someone having a college degree, but they do need a level of maturity equivalent to an upper-division algorithms course to be productive/useful.

It is odd that jobs which don't require this knowledge test for it.

[kodah]

Your job sounds super niche. I work in R&D and we definitely don't use DS/A most of the time. That said, most of these FAANG and start up jobs are just like mine. They test for those skills anyway.