Once I started interview practice on leetcode I began to see algorithms & DS in everyday coding tasks

> BFS vs DFS

Yet, on the real world the answer is always one of "either" or "neither".

Anyway, most leetcode aren't of the type of "a widely applicable algorithm solves this". People only know the algorithms that apply to them because they studied those problems specifically.

And notice that one of the algorithms on your post is named after a researcher from the 80s. That's some 40 years after computer science became a thing. That's how long it took the entire humanity for learning it without anybody specifically telling it to them.

Absolutely not lmao. Many problems are more efficiently solved with bfs vs dfs or vice versa. If the problem requires you to reach a leaf dfs is usually better

What? Neither of them are efficient in any practical sense.

BFS? Really, there are libraries for that and I would hire a kid who timidly used one as they could not remember how to implement it over someone who confidently introduced and off by one bug because they thought they knew how to implement it without references.

BFS/DFS is astonishingly simple. It’s like 10 lines of code. And it’s almost always done (in practice) with a custom type where you work your way through custom fields pointing to the next vertex, so it’s not an algorithm / structure that lends itself well to standard libraries. It’s not like a self-balancing tree (which is actually a bug-prone, large implementation that you should just let the standard lib handle).

If you can’t trust the people sitting next to you implement a simple graph traversal without bugs, then your organization has a professional standards problem.

There's an enormous gap between knowing when to use those tools and creating a solution with those tools when you already have the job, vs banging out a perfect solution in 20-40 minutes with someone looking over your shoulder, who is also deciding whether you deserve a paycheck based on those 20 minutes.