While the question of creativity vs programming skills is interesting, I think it's not even good to assume that people inverting binary trees on a whiteboard a

While the question of creativity vs programming skills is interesting, I think it's not even good to assume that people inverting binary trees on a whiteboard are good at coding. I know several people that are great at algorithms but write garbage code (unmaintainable, unreadable, untestable, etc). Or they can't take business requirements and turn them into low-level details in a useful way. The number of times a product manager has gone to an engineering team and said that they need a product that inverts binary trees is about equal to the number of working quantum computers.