> A. Someone who can solve engineering problems we can't with no context in under an hour.

Not all employers have dedicated IT teams, behaviour such as this fixes a problem without having to pay for it, while giving false hope to interviewees.

>> write a function to check if a string is a palindrome.

outside of an intern or junior these types of questions are such garbage. Do your teams write a lot of trivial, isolated functions in the day to day?

It's a smoke test, there are a lot of fakers out there. Everyone should be able to write a function to check if a string is a palindrome, regardless of the role not necessarily involving writing trivial isolated functions.

No, but it should be easy.

I agree for questions that are impossible if you didn’t memorize the specific algorithm that solves them.

This question and the others I tried to ask usually have a ton of possible solutions and someone who knows how to code or can at least talk with me about coding can come up with one.