What does this have to do with the bulk of the article (which is about algorithms the author used at his jobs, and only tangentially (IMO) about the use of algorithmic questions in interviews)?
The vast majority of algorithms I use are for parallelizing complex workloads, failure detection, and scoring systems. I usually DIY after I find the OTS ones unsatisfactory.
I'm not "smarter", they're general solutions but all I seem to have in life are specific problems so specific solutions perform better.