I came across concrete examples like this before, and solved them, so here's a slightly different take: I'm principally an engineer. In general it doesn't even

I came across concrete examples like this before, and solved them, so here's a slightly different take: I'm principally an engineer. In general it doesn't even matter what topic though obviously there are some which I know a lot more about because of experience. Programming is one of them. I don't have a CS degree, I've seen terms like b-tree a ton of times but couldn't even begin to explain what it is, you get the point. Now: the way I approach an example like this is similar to what you do, but the difference is that I'm merely aware there's a bunch of different containers out there which behave in different ways wrt lookup/add/remove/... and for the vast majority of them I have no clue about the implementation. I don't need such implementation knowledge to realize that another container might be the trick here. I also don't really need that knowledge to decide which container that eventually might be, nor to come to conlusions fast (since you're stressing that): that's a couple of minutes to lookup moreover the final decision stage will be through performance testing anyway, because measuring under actual usage is the only way I'll ever be convinced one is effectively better than the other. That's usually what is going to take time, not picking one out of x. In the extreme it might even be so that I'd first need to write a wrapper to then have a configurable container type just to be able to have people test it under different workload types, etc. Obviously I've been through this a couple of times and by doing so did become aware of main traits of various containers/algorithms/... and yes that will be somewhat faster in the decision process. Likewise there have been certain domains in which I did dig down all the way to the very bottom and obviously having to sort out problems in that domain will be faster for me. But in the end: for me personally 'x algorithms programmers should know' is useless. Job-dependent perhaps, on the other hand I've seen enough people struggle to come up with actual and practically useful software aspects exactly because they kept on getting lost in implementation details.