> I wouldn't call it "trivia" but "fundamental knowledge".
Something that will never be needed in a career can hardly be called "fundamental knowledge".
I don't remember anything about how merge sort works. If someone wanted to interview me on that, they'd convince themselves I can't code, despite decades of delivering production code.
> If the person you're interviewing went through college it should be easy.
I did study CS in university. A very top CS school, even (CMU). Probably I must've studied merge sort at some point, but the last algorithms class I took at CMU was almost 30 years ago. Not once have I needed that info since then, so it's long long forgotten. Its relevance to a software engineering career is nil.
Something that will never be needed in a career can hardly be called "fundamental knowledge".
I don't remember anything about how merge sort works. If someone wanted to interview me on that, they'd convince themselves I can't code, despite decades of delivering production code.
> If the person you're interviewing went through college it should be easy.
I did study CS in university. A very top CS school, even (CMU). Probably I must've studied merge sort at some point, but the last algorithms class I took at CMU was almost 30 years ago. Not once have I needed that info since then, so it's long long forgotten. Its relevance to a software engineering career is nil.