I agree with this - e.g not being able to bust out a dynamic programming implementation perfectly on a whiteboard doesn't make you a bad programmer - more impor

I agree with this - e.g not being able to bust out a dynamic programming implementation perfectly on a whiteboard doesn't make you a bad programmer - more important is to understand, "hey, looks like when I divide this problem up it has overlapping subproblems - let me research using memoization or dynamic programming". But that still assumes you have the right terms in your head to be able to do the research - and to me that's where some fundamental knowledge of algorithms and data structures comes in handy.