Based on 20 years of experience, lack of fluency in algorithms _is_ a surefire indicator of bad architecture skills. Yes, it gives a few false positives, but the amount of false negatives is pretty much 0.

And since actually getting a new person on-board is an expensive process, you aim for criteria that are a bit too stringent, if you can afford it.

There's also the issue that making a bad algorithmic decision at the center of the problem turns scaling into an insanely hard problem, sometimes. It's not so much about learning about it when you need it, but about avoiding issues in the first place.

True, there are many places where it truly doesn't matter - but if scaling/performance matter for your company, you don't want to head down the garden path because your developers didn't know better.

Not knowing algorithms won't exclude you from all jobs (or even many of them), but there are some jobs where it _will_ bite you. It's your choice if you want to go for those jobs. Personally, I think they are where the cool stuff is happening, but YMMV.