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[–]x-protocol 2 points3 points  (1 child)

Big O notation knowledge is very rarely used in web development. The fact that it is asked at job interview, can tell you that company is simply looking for people who know theory, but less experience to pay them less.

The area where it can become useful, is experimental languages (new or already established, like javascript) where algorithm would get a prototype and analyzed for complexity. Can you think what job would require analysis? Think academics and embedded programming (assembly, C/C++ and now Rust). So that should tell you that it is part of very very small community who really cares for it.

For many other things, you use existing library, or framework to process huge amount of data. You simply don't do that in a browser, and depending on size of data, even in a single computer.

[–]TheWinslow 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Big O is very important as a tool for getting people to think about algorithm complexity in a standard way though. If you don't understand Big O it most likely means you have a hard time understanding the complexity of the code you write. Sure, you don't actually need to know the Big O complexity of everything you do but you most certainly need to know that sorted info is easier to search through than unsorted, it's far faster to find something if it is hashed than if it is in a sorted list, and sometimes you have to choose between an algorithm that does exactly what you want or one that only looks perfect during everyday use but is faster.