I think there might be a happy medium. Knowing how to implement a specific algorithm is not necessary. Knowing of algorithms and picking the right one is import

I think there might be a happy medium. Knowing how to implement a specific algorithm is not necessary. Knowing of algorithms and picking the right one is important. For example, a junior developer apparently forgot about hash sets. He used a list for lookup. Worked fine in his local tests. Fail miserably when we had to load millions of records. A more seasoned programmer should be able to explain why a hash would work well here.