One may argue that a Phd student working in genomics must know the Monotone Queue variant because it MAY come up as a research implementation in his/her work. But this doesn't hold true for general software engineering folks.
I am a Phd student in Computer Graphics and so it is a reasonable expectation that I should know more about linear algebra than my peers. But if you extrapolate it to ask extremely hard research level problem it kills the purpose.
That's an interesting observation. So what you are saying is that if I make sufficient headway into the problem without providing the most efficient answer, it should be fine?
There are rumors that unless you are spot on perfect in Big 4 interviews, they wont advance you.