I share your sentiments. I, too, have never needed to reinvent the wheel and implement my own list class in Python say instead of using the one from the std lib

I share your sentiments. I, too, have never needed to reinvent the wheel and implement my own list class in Python say instead of using the one from the std lib. And countless other similar cases and things. That being said I think places do Algorthimic tests for two reasons: Laziness Scale Laziness. They choose this because they can’t be bothered to come up with a puzzle from the work and make it scoped well enough to fit an interview but also challenging enough to show the interviewer the candidates skills. So instead they have you implement some algorithm you memorized. Or they’re lazy because they’re incompetent interviewers and use these as a proxy for IQ. If that’s the case just leave. You don’t want to work there. Then there’s scale. Google likely gets 1000 applicants or a given role. (Maybe more by a factor of 10?) How would they filter out enough candidates before you sit for an hour with an expensive engineer? They need a way to quickly filter out a ton of folks. So that’s scale. It’s got a bit of laziness in it. But it’s primarily about managing the number of folks looking to try for a single job. All of that said I’m just a tardigrade in a fast chasm of space trying to take on the Death Star; there’s no way the tech firms will change their hiring ways because of some logical aren’t on my side. And who knows? Maybe you’ll get hired at Google and then go work on the next generation of kubernetes 2.0 — the point being this is a necessary evil that stands between you and many others to get paid 500k/year.