This has been my experience as well; It's as if every company is looking for a unicorn programmer... when their domain isn't any more or less unique than any other domain.

One of the "interesting" side effects is that it seems like interviewers are starting with the assumption that the person interviewing is an idiot who knows nothing and then works from there. So any slight misstep or misremembering of something puts you the fail box immediately.

My theory is that part of this is the broken culture of interviewing that we have as an industry. This "tricky CS puzzle" crap that originated at GOOG and MSFT is so prevalent that it's nigh impossible to actually succeed. More than once, it's obvious to me that the people DOING the interviewing couldn't pass their own interview...

Exactly, my favorite flavor of those are the ones where the interviewer appears to not stop until they find what you cannot solve, which is perfectly fine for an interview, but they still seem to treat that failure as an inability to program. One place I interviewed at wasn't doing much more than crud, and we got into our 4th cs question of that day, and my 6th with the company so far after their phone screen. They gave me some question that was solved with a flood fill. I admitted I had never encountered that before and muddled through it getting an answer that could not handle a few edge cases which I pointed out before they even brought it up. After that point they cut that phase of the interview short and the next guy asked me some things that were answered off my resume and they said they'd call me back which of course they didnt.

I could easily have been denied for other reasons but it's one of numerous interviews where I go through 1-n cs questions and whenever I get to the first one I can't solve the interview is cut short. It's just a giant waste of everyone's time

Ugh. I have a pretty decent job, and about 20 years of experience, so I have no need to job hunt. But if/when I do, I fully intend to adopt the policy that I will get up and walk out of interviews that do whiteboard coding puzzle tests. Having been trained to conduct such interviews at Google, I have no desire to participate in them. I can see their use for large companies like Google or Amazon that get thousands of resumes a day and can afford the false negatives if it means fewer false positives. But I can't see their utility at all for small companies hungry for good talent.

True. And it doesn't make sense given "at will" contracts everywhere.