contrarian123

I had a math teacher in middle school that put it pretty well: if you have two candidates that are equally qualified, but one knows calculus and the other doesn’t, you may as well go with the one that knows calculus.

From a hiring perspective, it cuts down the size of your candidate pool. Interviewing is expensive, so it’s better to choose from 5 people instead of 30.

From a personal perspective, I don’t want to work with you if you don’t know how to use a hashmap. There’s a difference between filtering duplicates efficiently and validating a binary tree, so it does it some injustice to lump it all together as irrelevant algorithms testing.