I remember seeing somewhere a popular list of top 10 algorithms used in systems, and it's kinda depressing to realize that the most recent algorithm on the list

I remember seeing somewhere a popular list of top 10 algorithms used in systems, and it's kinda depressing to realize that the most recent algorithm on the list, Skip List, was invented roughly 30 years ago, and every single one of them was taught in an introductory data structure course. That is, we most likely do not need to study the internals of algorithms nor need to implement them in production. For such a long time in history, smart and selfless engineers already encapsulated the algorithms into well abstracted and highly optimized libraries and frameworks. Of course, there are exceptions. ClickHouse implemented dozens of variations of HashTable just to squeeze out as much performance as possible. The algorithms used in ClickHouse came from many recent papers that are heavy and deep on math, which few people could even understand. That said, that's just exception instead of norm. Don't get me wrong. Having a stable list of algorithms is arguably a hallmark of modern civilization and everyone benefits from it. It's just that I started studying CS in the early 2000s, and at that time we still studied Knuth because knowing algorithms in-depth was still a core advantage to ordinary programmers like me.