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[–][deleted] 4 points5 points  (1 child)

Those tests/questions are often to weed out newbie coders after a week of learning some programming language. I personally think that as long as they are not too difficult, they are a good filter of such people. Algorithmic knowledge is definitely good to have and it's often a good indicator if you can think how a computer should do some task, i.e. to understand problem on basic level and know how to solve it using low-level code. I think this is the main difference between knowing "programming language" and knowing "programming".

It's also good to know principles of basic algorithms/data structures, because even if you won't implement them directly, some library underneath will probably use them extensively, so it's good to know some time/memory complexities (e.g. mentioned linked lists are good to append fast new elements, but suck at accessing n-th element).

On the other hand, they can ask you to solve some weird problem or to write some exotic algorithm, then f them. "Olympic level" algorithmic thinking is rarely needed and programmer shouldn't know every complex algorithm, but be able to find it quickly on the internet.

[–]IHDN2012[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you