My workplace has the opposite problem.

I don’t see that as a problem. The job description of an engineer includes dealing with new problems and onboarding onto new things. So you never wrote a parser and now you have to. That’s ok, just go ahead a and start from the ground up.

What I perceive as a major problem is the utter disconnect between what companies test for, and what companies actually do.

It makes no sense at all to evaluate candidates on obscure trivia questions no one will ever care about or use, let alone reject an applicant because they mixed up O(nlogn) with O(logn). It matters more if you know a good, healthy answer to tabs vs spaces.