I'm not saying that knowing this stuff is completely unimportant, but rather than using knowledge of algorithms as a rough signal of someone's ability to do their (non-algorithms-related) job, it's better to measure it more directly.
it's better to measure it more directly.
Firstly, how can we do that ? There's no way we can grant each candidate an evaluation period that lasts two or three monhts -- which is what it'd take to measure his performance directly. So, we need some heuristics.
Secondly, "is the candidate CS-literate at all" is just the kind of heuristic that we can use for this. And, IMO knowing about binary search (not necessarily by name, especially if the candidate is not a native English speaker) is a great test for this heuristic. It's pretty much the CS equivalent of "can you form words into sentences".
This is the sixth bimonthly 'What are you working On?' thread. Previous threads are here. So here's the question:
What are you working on?
Here are some guidelines: