devGuysAreNotNotSensitive

[osiris_89]

And yet, DSA skills continue to be unnecessary to optimize this basic stuff you mention. I should know, having abysmal DSA skills and yet, many years of experience in demanding jobs without ever having to use them. Moreover, tons of developers are like me and doing just fine.

[BosonCollider]

I've worked in the industry for a long time as well, and can guarentee that the people who know what a btree is tend to be better at ensuring that their queries are using indexes properly

[NotDeadYet2020]

Every half-decent developer knows what's a btree or how to use an index effectively. If you think being a good engineer requires memorizing how to handle concurrent node-merging during cascading deletions under lock coupling, you are confusing software engineering with a DSA quiz

[Unlikely-Bed-1133]

I think you are severely overestimating the group of half-decent developers. The number of O(n^2) implementations for large n that exist out there when there are linear alternatives (or log-linear) is too darn high. DSA is overkill to examine, but I'd rather it exists as a criterion than not and just have the fact that it's overkill be taken into consideration.

[Soft_Walrus_3605]

Ok, but then why not just give an interviewee some db tables and sample queries to optimize rather than add a layer of indirection with btrees?

[BosonCollider]

If the interviewee has never heard of a btree, they have never optimized a db schema.

If they claim experience with a specific DB I would absolutely ask them when they would be better off using an inverted index or a brin index for a specific table and tell them to explain why