[bobbbinsIII]

how often does a normal software developer find himself in a situation where he has to know about B-Trees in depth?

[bqe]

Basic computer science problems creep up often enough (about once a month) at my mostly normal job. We had to implement a prefix trie (specifically a modified radix trie with extra caching) to solve an interesting problem.

If you don't know about these data structures or algorithms, you won't even know where to look.

[dmatlack]

When he works for the company that this whole conversation is stemming from.

[cheald]

Database indexes are very frequently btrees; understanding how a btree works can inform how you structure and query data, resulting in substantially better software. They're also a generalization of the binary search pattern, which every programmer should be able to describe and utilize.