I think you give the whiteboard far too much credit. In the succeeding two decades I have worked at many companies filled with past, present, and future FAANG e

I think you give the whiteboard far too much credit. In the succeeding two decades I have worked at many companies filled with past, present, and future FAANG engineers, and I can definitely say knowledge of algorithms isn’t a defense against writing silly bugs when implementing a complex, novel project from scratch. Just a dumb oversight that would have been caught quickly by user reports—had all the engineers who cared not quit from misanthropic management. There were many such issues, and I only remember these two because I found them myself. I was in support and only had two good resources for tracking this kind of stuff down, a burnt out but kind SCSI specialist and a brilliant, massively overworked Russian kernel dev on visa. They both lasted an extra year. Bless them both for answering my pestering questions, I learned a lot. Good times, but all this was about a year too late to make a difference, then the Great Recession hit and it was done.