I'm not going to defend asking algorithmic questions in a whiteboard coding interview – there are lots of issues with this, but... If you don't know how to rev

I'm not going to defend asking algorithmic questions in a whiteboard coding interview – there are lots of issues with this, but... If you don't know how to reverse a binary tree, it's likely you won't ever think of it as a solution to a problem, so you won't encounter cases where you put these skills into action. Either through self-selection or through lack of ability to identify opportunities, if you don't have certain skills you'll be unlikely to need them! Web development or similar disciplines do sometimes manage to avoid these sorts of things, but debugging database index performance/size can lead down this path, processing data for complex business logic, data analysis, there are lots of cases in "web development" where these things can be applied, if you know where to look.