Again, you are assuming all software engineering jobs are like yours. I’d been on projects where I’d to deeply think about graphs and literally invent variation

Again, you are assuming all software engineering jobs are like yours. I’d been on projects where I’d to deeply think about graphs and literally invent variations of algorithms that worked for my scenario. I’d to written code for tree searching, online median finding, distributed minimum tree spanning etc in my various projects. If you are working in things search, AR, DL related products anyone will tell you that 1% of improvement in algo performance often translates to millions of dollars of savings. Unfortunately designing and evaluating algorithms is very hard earned skills and candidates who have internalized tools of this trade do much better than regular full stack folks. CS whiteboarding is precisely for such candidates but unfortunately full stack guys also started adopting them for their jobs. For full stack projects that need little to no algorithms design, take home coding question specific to tech stack works much better.