It may surprise you, but in the real world very few people get paid to find new primitive methods of manipulating fundamental data structures. Google may do a lot of that, but they are an unusual company. The problems a working developer is asked to solve are far more likely to involve higher levels of abstraction. The one I worked on most recently was coarse geocoding (find city/state) of free text. But a couple of decades ago I did sort of invent a use of BSP trees for searching RGB palette space (http://www.drdobbs.com/cpp/vga-palette-mapping-using-bsp-tre...). Well, probably not, but I still think I should get a cookie.
It may surprise you, but in the real world very few people get paid to find new primitive methods of manipulating fundamental data structures. Google may do a lot of that, but they are an unusual company. The problems a working developer is asked to solve are far more likely to involve higher levels of abstraction. The one I worked on most recently was coarse geocoding (find city/state) of free text. But a couple of decades ago I did sort of invent a use of BSP trees for searching RGB palette space (http://www.drdobbs.com/cpp/vga-palette-mapping-using-bsp-tre...). Well, probably not, but I still think I should get a cookie.