My feeling is that the fundamentals are difficult in their own way: requiring math, logic, creativity, seemingly arbitrary constraints. Learning the flavor of the month on stack X is often just learning their jargon, keywords, and matching common patterns one probably already knows.

All that said, sentiment against stack churn is significant and a common theme here on HN.

Because after a successful, productive, 5-10 years at a company you tend to forget the algorithms you don't use. I can remember enough about the knapsack problem to talk intelligently about it. I can't remember how to do the dynamic programming. In 90% of cases given infinite time I can eventually arrive at the solution to most med-hard questions. However, you don't have infinite time. I find problems like optimizing how much water goes into buckets to the point I can solve it in 4 minutes with variations so far below me it doesn't even register on my radar. For the record, I have over a decade in this industry. Having to do these problems makes me feel like that hard earned decade may as well had not happened.

For those of us with lives, hobbies, etc grinding leetcode is exhausting. Moreover, you can't just grind it. You have to grind it to the point you literally can brain dump answers in an interview.

Interviewers rarely care about your accomplishments. No one cares you did staff eng. at XYZ, managed engineers, have familiarity with all sorts of frameworks, etc. This is the only industry where every time you look for a job you're treated like don't have a resume. I think many (if not most) people are insulted by this because the people in charge are belittling them. I would be even Knuth would struggle to tackle a modern programming interview. That's a problem.

In my experience you're overstating the need to be able to instantly brain dump complex algorithms, except maybe at the FAANG level where I have no experience. It's far more important to be comfortable solving any simple coding challenge on demand in front of people in a high-stakes situation like an interview.

Because companies tend to let you learn those on the job. Nobody complains if I don't quite know Flask in interviews if I know Django. Certainly nobody cares if you know the details inside out or want to refer to docs.

Algos is a skill you do not use on the job and companies are extremely picky about you getting the correct answer.

How can you use algos if you aren't aware which places in your code you could significantly improve if you had that algo intuition?

You’re hired for your problem solving ability which includes being able to learn and apply specific algorithms if needed.

Asking questions that chat GPT can easily answer gives 0 insight into problem solving ability.

Sounds cool in theory, but the question stands

How are you going to improve existing codebase / new code if you aren't aware of the foundations, tools and basic primitives?

How many problems could be solved by just usage of z3 if you were aware of it?

How many problems could be solved by applying most popular combinatorial optimization methods/approaches

instead of writing something times, times slower, but eventually hacked enough to make it work?

You're assuming that that awareness of how to solve a problem and immediate hands-on-keyboard test for materially different success rates while actually employed. My experience is that by the time you've gotten the job, most of the crammed-in Leetcode specifics have leaked back out and you're in the same place as somebody who knows the thing from school or from using it in prior projects, but didn't have it in their fingertips during the interview--you're looking it up again, because you know what you need but don't have the details top-of-mind.

The insistence on being able to spew out code-first answers to contrived problems during an interview situation is silly gatekeeping, but it makes the people who pass feel good, and that's why it persists.

For 99% of the roles out there, needing to drop into algorithms all the time is an anti pattern that demonstrates lack of knowledge of your tech stack. I’ve had to clean up a lot of code written by people who wanted to show off their algo knowledge to solve a problem that should have been addressed with a few lines of SQL.