The most irritating thing with these competitive/algo stuff is that no matter how many times you master it - eventually you always forget it, because you don't need it on a daily (or more like yearly) basis in the real world.
It's also detrimental to the business.
But the submission does not mention job interviews. The linked book (the author is “one of the organizers of the Finnish Olympiad in Informatics […] coached and led the Finnish team at several international programming contests, including the International Olympiad in Informatics”) is someone's labour of love, written for people interested in this hobby. It brings joy and satisfaction to many people, most of them young students. Why throw cold water on them, by reacting to mention of such a book with terms like “irritating”, based on something that others do in some other setting entirely? Or, even if bringing up job interviews is justified (no doubt your irritation is real), it would be nice IMO to at least preface the comment by clarifying that the comment is not about the hobby/competitive-programming world that are the subject and audience of this book, but about something else.
People who discovered/invented these algorithms traversed several years of curiosity, blind alleys, dead ends, failures and successes. You can't possibly expect to get it all and make it up on memorization alone.
Algorithm learning is hard for the same reasons memorizing Math tables are hard.
As of today there is nothing novel about merely learning how a algorithm works and spitting it out in an interview, if anything it achieves the exact opposite goal of what it is supposed to.
In a high pressure situation like an interview, I personally find it difficult to think naturally through a problem. Familiarizing myself with different types of interview questions regularly helps a lot.
10 years ago I was pretty handy with CLRS, but now I'd be hard pressed to implement quicksort without looking it up.
Why not look them up when necessary ?
There are tests and interviews because not everyone can
I have a checklist of possible interview topics and I think I might an esoteric data structure part to it (knowledge not code) and some implementation choice questions - given this situation and data, with these queries what would your data structures look like.
Maybe also a few quotations on the last paper they've read in CS or related topic.
> The book is especially intended for students who want to learn algorithms and possibly participate in the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) or in the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC). Of course, the book is also suitable for anybody else interested in competitive programming.
Anyone in the target audience of the book will encounter most of this frequently enough; I definitely didn't have the experience (when I was in college and doing competitive programming, over a decade ago) that I was forgetting most of it.
Of course, if someone is not interested in competitive programming and never uses any of the knowledge they're likely to eventually forget it; it's just like learning a bit of French or group theory (say) and not touching it again for years — it's possible to forget. But not sure why that's irritating; it's just the nature of learning, at least after a certain age or below a certain threshold of practice.
Arguably competitive programming helps with this problem by letting you drill the concepts you've learned.
People in their 20s and 30s now will regret not stamping out ageism when they hit their 40s and 50s, as they inevitably will
The problem is, everyone in their 20s and 30s assumes they'll be gazillionaires by the time they're 40, because of course they're brilliant and hard work always pays off! Ageism is only a factor if you're not smart enough to make a billion by the time you're facing it.
Unfortunately then the victims of ageism now will find that cold comfort in the future.
They are a test of how recently you crammed for your CS finals, that’s all.
To your larger point, data structures and algorithms are popular in interviews for the same reason Project Euler is popular - it is very easy to ask a well defined, but interesting question about core CS or math.
Which, to some extent, makes sense. You're basically filtering out people who won't put in the effort to get the job. Whether or not those who put in the extra effort are actually going to be better employees is a different decision.
As is, it's more like advertising for python, then surprise java.
But those kinds of questions make zero sense and have zero value if the job is actually implementing CRUD apps in a high level language. You might as well quiz candidates on their assembly language skills too, for a Python job...
So there is obviously an ulterior motive.
In my practical experience I find that to get the "aptitude" requires a lot of effort put in it. It definitely would vary depending on the person and his experiences but practicing it is very important to go forward.
I fear it is like chess, the cognitive decline starts to become noticable in the mid 40s and only gets worse from then on.
There are a few exceptions like Korchnoi was in chess so there must be Fabrice Bellards and Bill Joys who would be able to keep up.
Still looking at completion times for Advent of Code made me feel old.