I would argue you can learn the efficiency of a binary tree search in a few months on a job too. And no, often times those people can't learn git on the job bec

I would argue you can learn the efficiency of a binary tree search in a few months on a job too. And no, often times those people can't learn git on the job because in so doing the mess things up so thoroughly in the repo half the time you have to rewrite history to clean up a bad push. I've seen it happen and this is not an issue of people trying to be smarter than the person they're interviewing. In point of fact, I just had an interview with a company where I'd be forking and improving open source code for building modular website content blocks and they asked me to write a bubble sort algorithm. Trivial, but I hadn't done it in 12 years since college. Now quicksort, that's actually useful, but a bubble sort? I got a little tripped up, remembered it eventually, but the whole time the "bad cop" in the interview was checking his phone, sitting cross legged on the heater and talking about his adjunct position at local, minor university. Who's trying to look smart?