[legojoey17]

Your last paragraph really resonated with me. I personally could not emphasis my feelings and opinion towards "companies who don't understands what makes a good employee for their company" by any means.

I'm currently a CS student and I do find many of the startups locally do involve loads of problem solving on the job, which is beneficial from general algorithm knowledge. Although I believe it's more so the ability to understand the concepts as opposed to spouting knowledge for any specific abstract data type or algorithm.

But by any means all companies are not similar, and outside of the purpose of prodding for problem solving aptness it is definitely not the best topic to discuss in an interview to find the /right/ employee for many of the companies of which do ask it.