"I work predominantly with server-side, interpreted languages, and I just don't run into the bottlenecks and performance problems that Big O-knowledge seems to mitigate."
I tend to think of programming tasks being split into two major categories: applications programming and systems programming.
My definition of these terms: applications programming is writing software to be used by a normal person. Systems programming is writing software to be used by another programmer. (These definitions may be a little different from how these terms are commonly used.)
From your self description, you seem to land pretty squarely on the application programming side of that divide. For most application programming tasks, getting good performance consists mostly of selecting libraries, databases, web servers, languages, etc. with the performance characteristics your application requires, and building your application on top of them.
The system programmer is the one writing those libraries, etc. and so those performance requirements fall squarely on them.
So I would say that as long as you stick to applications programming, algorithmic ignorance probably isn't a major problem. But a company like Palantir needs systems programmers (per my definition above, even if the "clients" are just other developers within the company) which is why they need to ask algorithms questions in their interviews.
I tend to think of programming tasks being split into two major categories: applications programming and systems programming.
My definition of these terms: applications programming is writing software to be used by a normal person. Systems programming is writing software to be used by another programmer. (These definitions may be a little different from how these terms are commonly used.)
From your self description, you seem to land pretty squarely on the application programming side of that divide. For most application programming tasks, getting good performance consists mostly of selecting libraries, databases, web servers, languages, etc. with the performance characteristics your application requires, and building your application on top of them.
The system programmer is the one writing those libraries, etc. and so those performance requirements fall squarely on them.
So I would say that as long as you stick to applications programming, algorithmic ignorance probably isn't a major problem. But a company like Palantir needs systems programmers (per my definition above, even if the "clients" are just other developers within the company) which is why they need to ask algorithms questions in their interviews.