Bit Manipulation is a collection of techniques that allows us to solve various problems by leveraging the binary representation of a number and its bits.

It’s very normal for a programmer to work on data types or data structure which stores large amounts of data in bytes. But sometimes it's necessary for a programmer to dive very deep to understand the real importance of bits.

Bitwise operations are faster and can sometimes optimize the program really well.

Bit Manipulation has a lot of real world applications too. It’s heavily used for Encryptions like Exclusive-Or Encryption and Data compressions. In both of these we have to extract the data at a bit level.

Is Bit Manipulation Important during Interviews?

Yes. The interviewer might not ask direct questions on bit manipulation but can ask problems which are related to bit manipulation like bitmask dp , number of subsets etc.

Also if the interviewer wants to check the basics he might ask you a lot of questions on this topic, Especially the functions of bitwise operators.