it is very sad. i personally would much rather someone walks through their problem solving approach and identifies shortcomings/edge cases than to regurgitate a memorized algorithm.

it's really easy to identify code that is not optimal at code review time. it is far more challenging to have a conversation with a algorithm-regurgitating robot that their entire approach was wrong because they misunderstood the abstraction or that their code wasn't needed because Larry is refactoring that part of the system to a separate service already.