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But we know that most of the time this isn't true. <1% of software developers write sorting algorithms on the job, and even fewer of those actually need to know which one is Bubble and which Quick and which Heap without reference.
If I'm a multinational company, I want my accountant to know what transfer pricing is. If I'm a self employed joiner, I don't.
Problem solving tests are good. Memorization tests are terrible. We have search engines for that.
I don't consider asking a developer about basic data structures and their properties as terrible. This is foundational knowledge that is useful for nearly every programming job. Knowing about lists, hash tables, trees, etc and their operations or tradeoffs is extremely important.
Similarly, having a developer that can reason about the runtime and memory complexity of the code they write is important as well.
These are the "lingua franca" things that I was speaking about in my previous post. Even if particular developers think that the above things aren't useful to them, I would argue that they are probably wrong and just don't know how or why they are.
But before that, I'd used them for 10-15 years without knowing the name because it doesn't matter. Take a hash table. Python calls it a dict. C++ calls it an (unordered) map. Java calls it.. whatever it calls it. It's nice to have that 'hash table' google term to find the thing you want in a new language, but otherwise they're just words.
Actually in usage I type {} in Python and it is what it is.
I'm not arguing that these things aren't useful at all.
I'm arguing that the distinction between the CS-ified person that has spent the effort to learn what the words mean to pass interviews is not substantially more knowledgeable or useful than the version of that person that will have to find it out in the future. It's marginal.
Basically it feels like a sort of 'table manners' test. You've put the fork on the wrong side of the plate, so you can't eat dinner with us today, you scoundrel.
Don't take this to mean that I think that computer science is useless. Far, far from it. It is simply that I think that relying on jargon is testing whether someone genuinely has a CS degree (or equivalent without certification). It's not testing whether someone is a good programmer.
If that's what you want, just ask for it. Let's not waste each other's time and money.
The anger here exists because people want good faith interviewing, and instead they get "bloody hell the last 20 people were crap I can't be bothered any more" interviewing.
