Even weirder: A lot of companies who are obsessed with big-O and algorithm complexity don't ask candidates even basic questions that require them to think across many orders of magnitude, in terms of time and storage. I'd argue that being flexible enough and able to visualize things across, say, ten orders of magnitude, is a more critical programming skill than knowing big-O.

Even basic questions: Answer with either the word nanoseconds, microseconds, or milliseconds: What's the order-of-magnitude latency of CPU cache lookup? Reading 1MB from spinning disk? Reading 1MB from memory? A round trip packet to a server 1km away? A GPU clearing a 4K screen? A mutex lock? Answer with kilobytes, megabytes, or gigabytes: What's the order-of-magnitude size of a digitized photo? A song? A movie? A graphics frame buffer? Wikipedia? Google's homepage? A typical bootloader? A Windows app executable file? A typical CPU L1 cache? L2 cache?

Too many junior developers can only answer a few of these, even with the answers having three orders of magnitude granularity! But we constantly ask them to belt out the best and worst case big-O complexity of a binary tree.