I interviewed a "Senior Architect" from a large company, and he had a masters in compsci. Very impressive sounding, much more than me. I asked a simple question

I interviewed a "Senior Architect" from a large company, and he had a masters in compsci. Very impressive sounding, much more than me. I asked a simple question on searching a sorted array and literally got a laugh. He was incredulous that anyone would be expected to know basic, and I mean basic, data structures and algorithms. People dismiss these questions with a "I'm not gonna be writing a stdlib". No, but the concepts appear everywhere. Someone that doesn't understand them is likely to, I dunno, use a SQL DB, then put a separate index on each column to " make it fast ". Whereas someone that understands the basics will stop and think a bit before assuming platforms are pure magic. (And BTW, I've seen enough people with patents to know that just having one is more a measure of going through the process than necessarily having technical invention capability.)