[joshuahutt]

There are plenty of places you can build valuable products and not have to think about optimization, ever. I'd imagine there are even places inside MANGA that you might get away without it. But, would expect those things to be the exception, not the rule.

While their process might be arbitrary, it tries to ensure that entrants can comfortably think about and select appropriate data structures and algorithms for problems, on demand.

In most cases, prepping for this feels like rote memorization, but through that process you start to build an intuition that helps you be more efficient at pattern matching and isolating the constraints/bottlenecks. And you've proven that you can learn and apply the algos. It's not the most fun of interview styles, but it does work for them.