I’ve been going back and forth with @brikis98 for a while on this and I’m still torn. The idea that someone can assess your software engineering chops by asking you to implement a binary search tree is laughable yet understanding fundamentals is obviously the basis upon which the best developers depend. I think my frustration comes from the idea that recalling trivia and minutiae about a specific data structure or algorithm passes for an assessment of someones grasp of fundamentals instead of focusing on use cases and trade offs. To make an analogy to carpentry, you wouldn’t ask a carpenter how to make a circular saw or a hammer but you would want them to know when to use one over the other.