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As a counterpoint, I work in high finance and one of our core systems that I'm expected to know extremely well uses Paxos for consensus.

Just because those topics show up infrequently doesn't mean that no one's using them. Plenty of companies outside of Google, etc. are doing complicated things that require a solid CS background.

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My point was not that they do or do not exist, merely the magnitude. I would venture a guess that for every software engineer working on a blockchain there are 100 working on crud-style applications. If a job on your team requires a solid understanding of these concepts, then by all means filter on knowledge of algorithms. My point is that many companies don't do anything remotely as complex and yet use the same filters to screen job applicants.

You should have programmers implement paxos on a whiteboard in their interviews.

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