Unpopular opinion, but the skills learned in these exercises really can translate to improvements in real world projects. We can get very far with most modern programming projects through brute force alone or by using standard library containers and algorithms, but past a certain scale it really does pay off to have an intuitive understanding of how data structures and algorithms work from first-hand implementation experience.

Of course, if a company is just building the stereotypical basic CRUD app to serve a maximum of 10K users total and maybe 10 per minute at peak, this probably doesn’t matter much.

However, companies that pay top dollar expect candidates with top knowledge, and that’s fair IMO.