Maybe but I once had an interview in which I was asked how to find how similar two text strings were (for search). I answered that I would use one of the algorithms from Apache commons text or within Lucerne which implement one or several of the appropriate distance algorithms. He told me he had written his own. I asked why he would do that when these algorithms were written by people who did intense research and the implementations in these libraries have been tested by more eyes than his could ever be. He said “what if I want it to run in Ruby?”...I was interviewing but this is a guy I would not hire. He was wasting time for his own amusement. Never assume people know to do the research on existing solutions. Many developers would rather work on their own toy solutions while avoiding the actual unsolved problems in their domain