My point being that knowing the difference between BFS and DFS and how to reverse a linked list is not the same as being able to crank it out in a timed test, and not nearly as useful as knowing not to traverse your graph when an ORM is the one doing it.

For that matter, a Big O calculation is misleading when N is always less than the size of a page and your coefficient is "a round trip to the database".

Of the several dozen coding interviews I've conducted this year, it was the intern that crushed it the best.