Conversely if you love algorithms and are sufficiently good at them then you can spend your entire career with that and never ever talk to non-technical people. Some people here thinks those jobs basically don't exist, but they do exist and are really important and well paid. And once you start working there you can just continue forever since there are so few who have experience working with those. Like, maybe Google asks algorithm questions since they want more people to improve their algorithms? I know they had low hanging fruit everywhere, they just lacked people who were competent enough at algorithms to solve them, their hiring bar is way too low to solve their hard problems. But they can't really raise it either, there aren't enough people that could pass them then.