[freshfunk]

At the larger tech companies, many of their problems typically are an issue of scale. They are dealing with large datasets, massive numbers of users, terabytes of data, etc.

When dealing with scale, its important to have efficient solutions. They may need to be time efficient or space efficient due to constraints. Even though space is cheap and hardware is fast, inefficient algos may never work or be very high cost.

Maybe you won't be the one implementing this infrastructure but you may be implementing code on top of this infrastructure and it matters that you understand (at least the basics) the consequences of designing things a certain way.