[eru]

> I guess it's just sophisticated enough.

Maybe, though just applying a commercial or open-source off-the-shelf solver is a lot easier than most of what they ask you to figure out in your average programming interview. Probably about as hard as doing some SQL queries, which we even entrust semi-technical people with.

Of course, when your first naive modelling attempt doesn't work (eg can't be solved in any reasonable amount of time), there's a bag of more complicated tricks and some real ingenious engineering you can do; but again, the lower rungs of that aren't all that dissimilar from what your local database guru does when she tells you to add more indices.