I recently bombed an interview with a graph theory question. I hadn&#x27;t done any real from-scratch implementations of that stuff, but I <i>do</i> know enough to discuss it and pseudocode it.<p>They were disappointed, they wanted to see runnable code right there on the whiteboard.<p>I think you&#x27;re right, you should know basic conceptual computer science. I felt like I did a good job of explaining that I understand enough to do a real implementation if I had to, with man pages and my IDE and so on. But nope, they wanted a piece of acrylic to be a compiler, and that&#x27;s just wrong IMO.