Programming

My workplace has the opposite problem.

I don't see that as a problem. The job description of an engineer includes dealing with new problems and onboarding onto new things. So you never wrote a parser and now you have to. That's ok, just go ahead and start from the ground up.

What I perceive as a major problem is the utter disconnect between what companies test for, and what companies actually do.

It makes no sense at all to evaluate candidates on obscure trivia questions no one will ever care about or use, let alone reject an applicant because they mixed up O(nlogn) with O(logn). It matters more if you know a good, healthy answer to tabs vs spaces.

I once was a part of an hiring loop where we assessed a candidate, and one other fellow assesser wanted outright to reject the candidate because he failed to answer one of his questions on data structures. Everyone in the meeting voted in favour of that hire, except that one guy. When we asked to reconsider his position, he threw a tantrum because he felt that it was a matter of principle that we had to not hire a candidate that didn't knew trivia. The hiring manager asked if that info was important, and in case he felt it was whether it could be looked up online in a matter of minutes, but the assesser tried to argue that it was besides the point.

Data structures and algorithms trivia feels like ladder pulling.