> If you're an expert on data structures but can't write programs, you're useless. I agree here, which is why the author of the original post suggest contribut

> If you're an expert on data structures but can't write programs, you're useless. I agree here, which is why the author of the original post suggest contributing to open source projectors. The projects that he suggests require getting more than a surface knowledge of how data structures are implemented. There are certainly programming jobs that don't require knowing data structures, but if you're a good programmer and you understand data structures and algorithm, the total pool of jobs open to you is much higher (and you're much less immune to being treated as a commodity, although in my experience that has more to do with the company and the industry rather than specific work). But overall, seeing the software a candidate has contributed to (fixing bugs, implementing new features, starting new projects) is a much more reliable indicator than whether they can white board an algorithm to detect a loop in a linked list without using any additional storage. You can minimize false positives and false negatives, but you're going to get them.