I have been doing this for 20 years. I used to be good at algorithmic challenges 20 years ago straight out of university - because that is a ,lot of what we did

I have been doing this for 20 years. I used to be good at algorithmic challenges 20 years ago straight out of university - because that is a ,lot of what we did. I have these I have used "challenging" algorithmic stuff a handful of times in my careerer. Same with recursion, I have used it, but not too many times. If I do hackerrank or leetcode or something similar these days, it's pretty much luck if I will get it. If I sat down long enough I could work it out, but with a 2 hour time limit, its usually 50/50 whether the answer appears in my head in that time frame. And here's the thing. I write a lot better code than I used to. I know what is important, and it isn't clever algorithms, it's choosing the right abstraction, and keeping things maintainable. Making the code easy for the next developer to follow. For the vast majority of software roles out there this will be so much more valuable than algorithmic knowledge. Sure knowledge of computer science fundamentals is important, but I think we give it too much emphasis over what really counts. Basically these are testing for a computer scientist when the job is for a software engineer.