> Is that why most prestigious jobs grilled you like a devil on algos/system design?

No. That’s because interviews have always sucked, and have always been terrible predictors of how you do on the job. We just never had a better way of deciding except paying for a project.

> That’s just nonsense. It’s like saying “delivering product was always the most important thing, not drinking water”.

That’s… not an argument? It’s not even a strawman, it’s just unrelated.

The thing a customer has always paid for was the end product. Not the code. This is absolutely trivial to see, since a customer has never asked to read the code.