I think getting As correlates pretty well with grinding through interview questions. Perhaps not the same type of questions, but it's still "learning standardiz

I think getting As correlates pretty well with grinding through interview questions. Perhaps not the same type of questions, but it's still "learning standardized skills from a prescribed area of study". I don't think most algorithm interviews correlate with what you actually do on the job though. There's a lot more communication (eg trying to figure out what the boss/client/pm really wants, explaining non-trivial concepts to impatient/bored colleagues, or trying to convince other people that your "crazy" idea is actually sane), and a lot less hard problems thrown "in your face" (eg. prove that there is no solution for a^n + b^n = c^n where n > 2), but a lot more hidden traps that don't show themselves until something blows up in production (eg. turns out a minor version difference of python triggered a serious outage).