> I've found that far less people in software understand and are curious about algorithms than there were 15 years ago, despite the fact that almost everyone st

> I've found that far less people in software understand and are curious about algorithms than there were 15 years ago, despite the fact that almost everyone studies them now for interviews. I would argue people who prep with LeetCode aren't studying algorithms at all, they're doing something much closer to memorizing. I've seen people who I assume did a bunch of cramming like that because they'll be like "oh this is [xyz]" and throw out a solution in a hurry, and then I ask them to modify it in a non-standard way, and it's almost as if the idea that an off-the-shelf regurgitation of the "normal" solution for a problem not being able to handle a modified scenario is something they've never thought about. Like "oh this is a search problem" -> "what if [something that essentially boils down to the graph potentially having cycles]?" -> [head expodes instead of thinking about, say, tracking what nodes have already been seen]