Not every company is a startup.
Exactly this. A company making microscopes probably doesn't need to hire biology PhDs, and wouldn't ask obscure biotrivia in an interview...
That's a good one. My friends in engineering (physical sciences based, e.g. aerospace) and I have decided that the analog in that industry to programming interviews would for the candidate to be bombarded with questions asking him to evaluate complicated integrals from the CRC or something like it.
Not every company is a startup.
I'd much rather say a company like Google might have problems that require deep knowledge both inside and outside of someone's domain, but startups - no. They need to ship and optimize on the go, rinse and repeat.
> With strong math and CS knowledge, you can reason through almost any problem.
Until you can't. Math and CS, while certainly giving new perspectives, don't add much to the actual solution. What makes developers great is experience and not some text book knowledge of a topic. Hands on experience is a game changer.
Majority of the developers don't work and will most likely never work on something life-changing that they need to know every algorithm and data structure out there. Their time is better spent elsewhere.