That's what the onboarding, code reviews, programming conventions etc.. are for. We've hired people like that, and while they require more initial tutoring tha

That's what the onboarding, code reviews, programming conventions etc.. are for. We've hired people like that, and while they require more initial tutoring that someone with 10+ years of programming experience, they pretty quickly understand what the "readable" code looks like, and start producing it. On the other hand, it is pretty easy to accidentally introduce O(n^2) complexity into the system, and that is not something you can explain quickly during the code review. (but maybe I am biased by my area, which has lots of data, tight timing requirements and non-trivial algorithms. Perhaps if you are working on web dev or GUI development your requirements are different? but then why do you ask about algorithms in the interview...)