I've been in IT for about 20 years - all kinds of roles with the lowest common denominator being is that I stayed "hands on". Never in my career did I have to

I've been in IT for about 20 years - all kinds of roles with the lowest common denominator being is that I stayed "hands on". Never in my career did I have to do any of the things some of the "interview prep" material out there is geared towards (even though I understand this is supply and demand as some companies are notorious for this CS exam type line of questioning). That's not to say that I didn't have to deal with algorithms - things like strategies for cache cold starting and invalidation, custom encryption, high volume batch tokenization of sensitive information etc etc. The thing is - every time I faced a task that would require a reasonably involved algorithmic approach I would do research, prototype the solution, functional/perf test different approaches etc etc. For that reason I would take someone who can outline these steps for me preferably with the tools/frameworks involved over someone who happened to remember a specific CS algorithm I asked them about. And if they can tell me how they would go about automating their testing, how they would react to unexpected events like message delivery mechanism failures that would be even better :)