Not only is it the most important skill (unless for small home projects maybe), it's also the one which takes the longest to learn and hence the one you really improve on during the years and which distinguishes the experienced ones from the lesser experienced ones. Coincidently, it's also the skill for which you won't find a ready-made answer on stackoverflow or any other site/book.
thinking of it, I've also seen this as a typical difference between fresh CS graduates and those who have been programming for 10+ years. The latter would sometime take way longer to come up with clever math-oriented algorythms than the first, because the graduate has been trained for it and still has it fresh in memory, but experienced programmer would make up for that by being able to use the algorithms in all proper 'best practice' ways one can think of. Whereas the graduate would just slam it in somewhere and call it a day even though there are now x more dependencies and whatnot, you get the picture.
This is pretty much how I feel just now (after 12 years). I know Django pretty well after 4 years, and know where and how to add things to avoid breaking other parts of the code and make it work consistently with other parts.
Yet nearly every job I apply for these days wants a 90 minute online test. (I just had to implement a sorting algorithm in psuedo code - I have never in 12 years had to implement a sorting algorithm as I choose an appropriate library to do that for me).
Yup, exactly this. Which is why when we hire, we try to at least get hold of code written by the interviewee and preferrably make him/her come over for a day or so and have him/her do some programming. Much more valueable than 90 minutes of putting someone under some stres-test which doesn't resemble an actual job at all. I read similar things on other comments here so hopefully there's a shift going on. Especially because I would fail terribly at standard interviews as well :]
>> Yet nearly every job I apply for these days wants a 90 minute online test. (I just had to implement a sorting algorithm in psuedo code - I have never in 12 years had to implement a sorting algorithm as I choose an appropriate library to do that for me).
True, but if you can't implement a simple sorting algorithm how are you going to implement _____ ?
Since the process of implementing _____ is almost certainly completely orthogonal to regurgitating a memorized algorithm one would never directly write themselves (to a fantastically close approximation of never) I'm not sure how that question has any validity at all.
thinking of it, I've also seen this as a typical difference between fresh CS graduates and those who have been programming for 10+ years. The latter would sometime take way longer to come up with clever math-oriented algorythms than the first, because the graduate has been trained for it and still has it fresh in memory, but experienced programmer would make up for that by being able to use the algorithms in all proper 'best practice' ways one can think of. Whereas the graduate would just slam it in somewhere and call it a day even though there are now x more dependencies and whatnot, you get the picture.