No. I learned algorithm complexity in secondary school and started early enough that coding my own hash table was a normal exercise because the standard library

No. I learned algorithm complexity in secondary school and started early enough that coding my own hash table was a normal exercise because the standard library didn't come with one (Turbo Pascal). I also discovered competitive coding via the International Olympiad in Informatics (also a school thing, pre-college), and the kinds of problems in those turn out to be almost identical in form to today's style of coding interview. I only had to learn recursion and I could start hacking away at problems. Fancy techniques like "dynamic programming" are normally amenable to memoized (i.e. cached) recursion implementations, but in practice most interview problems aren't even that hard. Now, I went to college, but it was a mixed degree with business and it didn't teach things like hash table implementation, let alone pointers. Algo analysis material was weak. I was the best student only because I knew it already. The degree is mostly useful for visa qualification. I also got very good at pool.