Yeah, because we spend the whole day reversing a linked list in your real-life SWE job, right?
It's ridiculous that we have to study all those algorithms that we will never use it in your life, it's just too much.
I had an interview once that wanted me to do A-star "find fastest routing of internet packets between sites" and when I presented a brute force path finder and he complained about the big O, I told him that his problem as framed only featured tens of graphs and his business domain as framed (as a function of the company's domain) would never have more than 20 sites, and anyways a sneakernet (ship ssds) would be faster (which he conceded).
Me: “This is a domain I’m familiar with because I spent 9 years working in the bill payment industry. Here all of the corner cases you have to deal with. You’re much better off using these USPS certified CASS solutions instead of writing it internally for these reasons and went on to explain all of the drawbacks of writing software that didn’t give you a competitive advantage.”
The middle level developer interviewing me wasn’t impressed. The director was and I got the job and soon became the lead.
