The sad truth is that many people who program professionally simply cannot so basic programming tasks. If anything, I think top 10% might be overestimating how many can do it - I suspect 10% might have some kind of idea of how binary search would work, but most of them will fail with edge cases etc.
Jeff Atwood references a good example: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/02/why-cant-programmer...
The sad truth is that many people who program professionally simply cannot so basic programming tasks. If anything, I think top 10% might be overestimating how many can do it - I suspect 10% might have some kind of idea of how binary search would work, but most of them will fail with edge cases etc.