Come on -- you're on of the commenters I make a point to read on HN. You can't possibly have missed that a huge chunk of valley interviews are, exactly, a fucking smart person pissing contest.

A previous employer loved them some graph problems for interviews. I got in an argument with one of the senior engineers, and demanded I be shown where in our codebase we used graph algorithms. The answer: nowhere. But you had to know your way around them to get hired there.

Now when I interview, I refuse to study them. I think this serves me well in helping me avoid jobs I wouldn't enjoy anyway.

An interviewer once essentially demanded I invent morris traversal on the whiteboard in front of him. I'm not sure how that related to my ability to be an ml engineer.

Heh. Thanks for the compliment. I have actually never sat for a valley interview, so I didn't want to judge based on second-hand data. But I'd believe it entirely.

I think in some (maybe many) cases it is a "pissing contest." In other, and probably the majority, of cases I'd hope it is a case of simple inexperience coupled with arrogance resulting from the relative immaturity of the field. And I mean "immaturity" in more than one sense. The industry itself is young, especially compared to "traditional" engineering and sciences, and it is also filled with a high proportion of relatively immature people, at least in comparison to the slice of academia I was in.

Been through dozens of interviews in the last 5 years and never encountered this. I think this would work well because it draws out a conversation. An interview should be about discovering how a person solves problems, not about either the problem or the solution.

In fact, a long time ago an accountant used this very technique to decide that I was a smart software guy. He then hired me even though he knew nothing about computers and software.

If an engineer can contribute in a pair programming session then you know they have something to contribute in your development team later, even if you don't pair all the time.

i bet there is a little bit of interviewer insecurity going on. "look how hardcore we are, we act like this is normal and we solve problems like this every day"

when i run in to an interview like this, it tells me i dont want to work with these people.