Many (most?) programming jobs are about understanding the tools and libraries of an ecosystem well enough to build something useful. When I interview people, I

Many (most?) programming jobs are about understanding the tools and libraries of an ecosystem well enough to build something useful. When I interview people, I want to know if they can think. I want to know what their attitude will be like (to work with/near them). I want to know what gets them excited (in the context of work, mind you). The older and/or more things a candidate has done in their life, the more accumulated wisdom they will have. This will translate into making better choices earlier (about approaches to problem solving). Testing against university compsci concepts is more likely to get a candidate who will either ignore a well tested and commonly understood library in favor of rolling their own (less-maintainable) code.