A developer working with HTML, CSS and Javascript does not need to know algorithms whatsoever. I'd only partially agree with this. One of these things is not

A developer working with HTML, CSS and Javascript does not need to know algorithms whatsoever. I'd only partially agree with this. One of these things is not like the others: HTML and CSS are not programming languages; JavaScript is, and we're treating it like one now. As we move into a world of "client side applications" rather than "dynamic HTML," JS can be an order of magnitude more complex than it was just a few years ago. If you're going to use Angular or Backbone well, you're going to need to have a solid understanding of at least a few design patterns. You're probably going to need to know the difference between a queue and a stack and when you'd use one or the other (or neither), and you're going to need to be able to look at a problem and say "this is something I need recursion for." There's an awful lot of people who could make a good living as a web developer in 2004 who couldn't in 2014. Having said all that, I think the current hiring process, particularly among Facebooks and Googles and startups that emulate them, is pretty heavily biased toward things one only learns in computer science degree programs (or when one is desperately floundering around trying to solve a "take home" interview puzzle). I don't want to claim that it's bad to know how to do directed graph cycle detection in your language of choice, but the need to do that is only going to come up in fairly specific circumstances -- and it's more important to know that someone you're hiring can find the information necessary to solve a problem and apply it than it is to know whether or not they have that information memorized. (I'd also argue that demonstrating they can write readable, well-documented code that other people can actually work on is really important, but I almost never see that tested, oddly enough.)