I completely agree! I run a data science department at a corporation and I give applicants real world data and ask them to answer real world questions. "Here's

I completely agree! I run a data science department at a corporation and I give applicants real world data and ask them to answer real world questions. "Here's a dataset of the dates we sent an email and the open rate. Does one day of the week have a higher open rate than the others?" People have to know how to turn a string into a date, turn a date into the day of week, and then apply statistical reasoning and then give me a one sentence answer. That kind of thing is far more common at work than explaining the kernel trick.