How relevant are data structures to your Common software development job?

Question

For context I am a student at University and as I am looking up jobs and placement opportunities. When looking at the majority of applications it would seem that very few Data structures would ever be used. I suppose my main question is what is the most commonly used and efficient data structure that most companies are willing to take on? 

Answer 1

In my experience companies rarely have the know-how or the time to do complicated algorithm & datastructure work, and they'll just buy specialist software that does it better than they ever could anyway.

Like maybe(?) I could implement a decent B-tree for storage if I tried but setting up SQLite takes 5 minutes.

A friend of mine once excitedly told me that he had to use actual maths in his then-current project: The vector product to find a normal vector. Back then I was like, "that's high-school maths, you are hyped about *that*?"; but now that I work in programming myself I'd love to get that level of challenge.

And I love my job by the way, it's great, but not for algorithm & datastructure reasons. I do webdev and some data shuffling and statistics for a large-ish website (but still "small data").

The most exciting datastructures I get to use myself are lists/arrays and hashmaps/hashsets, sometimes optimized for parallel access. I've used a circular buffer like once and a binary tree I think never.