In the current market there’s abundance of junior or mid-level developers from body shops applying to senior level positions. If you cannot stand from this crowd and shine by balancing the tree right, why someone would care hiring you? I can tell you plenty of stories about people who had impressive background and great soft skills, but in the end barely can do their job.
> If you cannot stand from this crowd and shine by balancing the tree right
I don't think memorization of an algorithm is what should make a senior level candidate stand out. Senior people need to be able to lead, mentor, self manage (this is a huge one IMO), and understand the bigger picture. "How do we avoid having to balance this tree at all?"
The role of the senior Engineer isn't to tell you how to balance the tree. You, or anyone you instruct to, can simply ask google that or use a library.
Their role is to ask why we need to balance the tree. You very definitely can't ask google that, and that's why you need to hire a senior Engineer.
It’s one of the ways, for sure. But it is really interesting to me how a person without deep knowledge of fundamentals can lead or mentor anyone while being on a non-management position? They are supposed to gain authority from their professionalism, but without theoretical knowledge they won’t be able to justify their decisions, and then what? What exactly they can teach anyone?
As a senior/lead developer with years of broad experience you don't need to remember details of every algorithm in existence. But you should keep information scrap in your head to guide you or your apprentice to relevant source of information.
"Hi <dev name>! I think we may need to optimize memory consumption of this distinct element counting code a bit; I remember there is some HyperLogLog algorithm which should help here... let's check how it goes... (reading Wikipedia page)[0]"
On a first date you don't do boring everyday stuff becouse you don't want to spend time on that.
My experience is that hireing descicion is so noisy that there are no reason to invest too much since the rate of sucess is barely increased anyway.
The more picky the employer seems the less reason to apply. It might be a internal candidate allready chosen or they are just hoarding resumés to keep recruiters occipied.
The decision is allready made from the from the first minutes ... but you can ruin it of course.
