Google is not one of the most prestigious anymore. It's sought after because it has nice employee perks, but it's fallen a long ways from the early days in terms of prestige. They now have thousands of engineers working on mundane jobs moving around advertising data.
I've interviewed a couple of ex-googler's (not fired, still employed there) at a startup and we had to turn them down. They could handle a simple coding exercise fine, but then fell over in the component where they had to debug code and extend it with a feature.
That was when I realized a big chunk of Google's employees are going to be a reflection of their interview process (puzzle solvers but not software engineers). This was even reflected in the creation of the Go language. It's stupid simple to deal with Google employees that don't know how to use more advanced features in a language without creating something unmaintainable.
You can get 20 years 6 figure salary in most of the locations Google operates offices working for other companies. Especially in the bay.
If you write any sort of library code, you might actually start using those algos. You might have to start looking at CS papers too if your assigned a large enough scale problem!
He wanted the solution, and google interviews are more algo heavy than most. There is also this:
Using them and understanding them are still a lot different than memorizing them to the point of working with them on a whiteboard in a google gang bang interview.
I reviewed lots of CS papers while in uni and it only took a quick search to confirm the algorithm was what I had in mind. Completely unnecessary to memorize each one.
