I think we - and by that I mean "most programmers, on average" - have a pretty good idea how common or uncommon it is in real life programming in a variety of p

I think we - and by that I mean "most programmers, on average" - have a pretty good idea how common or uncommon it is in real life programming in a variety of programming jobs to encounter an actual algorithmic problem. One that you are better off solving yourself instead of just googling or asking (yes, on horrible SO). The last sentence does not advocate copy&paste programming, I myself in particular actually have hardly any external dependencies because I try hard to avoid them, and when I do I actually do look through the source code, mostly because I need to adapt it to my needs. Even if I were to do something like machine learning I'm much better off just using something made by others, simply because developing the actual algorithms requires people completely immersed in just that and a big love of math (and the Ph.D. to go with it) much more so than programming.