I did somewhere around 20 interview loops during my last job search. Phone screens, take-homes, onsites, "culture chats" that were secretly technical screens. At one company I did eight rounds, was told I passed, was told the offer was sent, it was never sent, then a new recruiter said I'd declined the offer I never saw. I did four more rounds. Passed again. Headcount was closed. Through all of that, you know what never once came up on the actual job? Inverting a binary tree. This debate isn't new. Every six months, a Reddit thread blows up with senior data engineering folks asking why they're being tested on dynamic programming when their actual job is debugging why a pipeline silently dropped 2M rows last Tuesday. But in 2026, with 80,000 tech layoffs in Q1 alone and companies banning AI tools in interviews while AI reshapes the job itself, the question isn't theoretical anymore. It's a breaking point.…