Are there any non-real-world coding tasks? I never wrote code for a novel or a TV series. If the non-real-world coding tasks exist, it’s gotta be a tiny market.

If what they mean by that is “not implementing data structures in the CS curriculum,” to imply it’s more advanced coding, it sort of gives away the shallowness of their software expertise. Those _non-real-world_ constructs hide far more complexity, and the patterns they rest on can be applied neatly to many domains - not to mention they are often borrowed from other domains like operations research, logistics, biology, physics, math etc.