This explains why: From the article: From Terence Tao: professional mathematics is may be quite different from the reality. In elementary school I had the va

This explains why: From the article: From Terence Tao: professional mathematics is may be quite different from the reality. In elementary school I had the vague idea that professional mathematicians spent their time computing digits of pi, for instance, or perhaps devising and then solving Math Olympiad style problems. In real life its the same. You don't cook up interview coding problems and solve them whole day. You have real world work to do and often that requires a degree of productivity, not knowledge. This is even more so true given how cheap and easy access to knowledge has become because of the web. From GH Hardy: it is useless to ask a youth of twenty-two to perform original research under examination conditions, the examination necessarily degenerates into a kind of game, and instruction for it into initiation into a series of stunts and tricks. Notice how closely this matches with interviews which mandate people to demonstrate expertise in trivia. Or quickly state the Big-Oh complexity of some sorting algorithm. From Andrew Wiles: Real mathematical theorems will require the same stamina whether you measure the effort in months or in years [...] Almost any real measurement of algorithm expertise is in seeing how good a person in coming up with a new algorithm for a novel problems. What exactly is your knowledge of 100 sorting algorithms worth, when it can be searched for in a google search which takes a few milliseconds. Interview Algorithm guru's to me are no better than those smart elecs who used to show up in school having memorized multiplication tables and then demonstrate that as some kind of mathematical ability.