Oh don't get me wrong, I'm a philosophy major drop-out, not a CS student. :-) I have never gotten off on clever-C, and it makes me feel stupid, which yeah, isn't awful either (humbling).
Luckily my day-job has nothing to do with mental gymnastics even though I'm a software engineer at Google and work in plenty of low-level stuff. Most sensible software development bears little resemblance to the stuff on whiteboards in coding interviews etc.
After 20 years of this I know the right thing is to reach for a library, and if that doesn't exist, then reach for Knuth or some other reference rather than try to write it myself from scratch.