Many highly skilled and experienced programmers would struggle with this kind of thing in a whiteboard interview, but then if hired would be very good at the job.<p>The interview scenario is just not similar to on-the-job coding. It has different social pressures, time pressures, access to help, access to privacy, etc. etc.<p>Plus, for someone like me (I studied machine learning and stats, and all data structure knowledge is self-taught post college, yet I have 6 years experience writing scientific code, performant database stuff, etc.) I am always hearing about data structures and algorithms that are supposedly &quot;fundamental&quot; but I never even heard of them before and have yet to need them in a job.<p>Basically, all of my experience, and all of the experience of hiring software developers in any of the companies I&#x27;ve been in just completely suggests what you&#x27;re saying is actually not true. It&#x27;s just a story we tell to allow us to keep our crab mentality hazing rituals.