While that is true, it's also important to recognize that sometimes it's easy to hand-wave when discussing algorithm, in a way that's impossible when you write

While that is true, it's also important to recognize that sometimes it's easy to hand-wave when discussing algorithm, in a way that's impossible when you write actual code. I have noticed this a lot of time when interviewing SWE roles (a request to commenters: let's spare ourselves the usual centithread complaining about whiteboard interviewing)—a lot of people can vaguely talk about the algo but not able to write code for it.