> Not every project needs them as much, but in large enough institutions, every engineer is likely to run into at least one project that does. If they can't fig

> Not every project needs them as much, but in large enough institutions, every engineer is likely to run into at least one project that does. If they can't figure it out and can't get help from someone who can, their weak solution can easily cost the company and its other engineers far more than it would have cost to interview engineers properly and compensate the fewer qualified engineers commensurately. I worked at a very large company (over 100K employees) for over a decade. I definitely encountered problems where knowing complexity and graph algorithms helped. Not knowing them would have cost the company almost nothing. I think you're subject to survivorship bias. Many (most?) large Fortune 500 companies make the bulk of their money by simple business logic and grunt work. Not by scaling. Internet based companies (which are the minority) are outliers.