Most people hate the coding challenges asked in interviews because they rarely relate to the day-to-day of a software engineer. So why do companies still ask them? The core reason starts at big tech companies where they can be dealing with massive scale. Imagine your algorithms are now performing expensive operations (ex. accessing databases, making API calls that cost real money, and slow/time-based tasks). If that code isn’t optimized somehow, then you could be wasting valuable CPU and memory,