Maybe your company is too small for data structures and cutting every 0.1ms latency count. As an example at Google I needed director level exception to introduce 0.1ms latency to the ads server (which wasn't needed at the end, but the monetary damage for timeouts is real).
Understanding basic data structures and how the computer works is important in these cases, even if you just need it once in 3 years.
The rarity of this scenario is not remotely close to once every 3 years, and not everyone is interviewing to work on something so obscenely performance dependent.
Probably >99% of developers will never encounter something like this in their career.
Fair, but for those unaware, ads infra at Google etc. are a class of their own because it's the starkest place in the pipeline where latency = -$. More like high-speed trading fintech than regular engineering. They don't care anywhere near as much about services (possibly--but possibly not even--google.com).
Maybe your company is too small for data structures and cutting every 0.1ms latency count. As an example at Google I needed director level exception to introduce 0.1ms latency to the ads server (which wasn't needed at the end, but the monetary damage for timeouts is real).
Understanding basic data structures and how the computer works is important in these cases, even if you just need it once in 3 years.