Previously at Uber, Skyscanner, Skype/Microsoft. I love to help people grow and share what I learned. I write longer articles on software engineering at blog.pragmaticengineer.com.
I think you misunderstand what I meant by you need to know data structures and algorithms. Where I work, we don't ask you to implement any of these on interviews (some companies do ask this - though a lot more are turning into more practical problems). You need to know them, to be able to solve the type of coding problems that can be understood in 5 minutes and solved in 45 minutes with no framework dependencies. So things testing your problem-solving skills. Though when I learned about them, I implemented them for fun - as they're all pretty simple ones, and it's a fun little challenge to do so.
For places like Google and the like, to pass the interview process, you most likely need to prepare for these - become familiar with how the structures work, cases where they are good solutions, and if you're curious, looking into real-world examples where they are used (e.g. do you know what tree structure is a very popular to use for SQL database indexing and why? It's interesting to learn why and how).
Not knowing these doesn't make you a worse programmer. But you'd probably do worse on the interview than the many other candidates you're competing for that same position at these places where it's competitive to get through each of the rounds, and then getting an offer.
What is the extra information an interviewer gets from the candidate if he/she solves a problem with this lexical knowledge or another one where this knowledge is not needed?
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I think you misunderstand what I meant by you need to know data structures and algorithms. Where I work, we don't ask you to implement any of these on interviews (some companies do ask this - though a lot more are turning into more practical problems). You need to know them, to be able to solve the type of coding problems that can be understood in 5 minutes and solved in 45 minutes with no framework dependencies. So things testing your problem-solving skills. Though when I learned about them, I implemented them for fun - as they're all pretty simple ones, and it's a fun little challenge to do so.
For places like Google and the like, to pass the interview process, you most likely need to prepare for these - become familiar with how the structures work, cases where they are good solutions, and if you're curious, looking into real-world examples where they are used (e.g. do you know what tree structure is a very popular to use for SQL database indexing and why? It's interesting to learn why and how).
Not knowing these doesn't make you a worse programmer. But you'd probably do worse on the interview than the many other candidates you're competing for that same position at these places where it's competitive to get through each of the rounds, and then getting an offer.
I see, but one thing is still not clear.
What is the extra information an interviewer gets from the candidate if he/she solves a problem with this lexical knowledge or another one where this knowledge is not needed?