And the person who could potentially write the "most perfect" code with all of the conditions applied is often not within that company's price range.

I did interviews at a company for about 2 years and there was constant pressure from management to do trivial crap like that, it finally came to a head and I invited management and one of the "rockstars" to do a mock interview.

When it was evident that the person they thought of as a "rockstar" could not solve these tests(without prior knowledge of the problems), they immediately discounted them as a worthless and stopped bugging me (about that, of course not about everything else).

What the hell. A developer who writes x << 3 instead of x * 8 when writing code that is logically doing multiplication is not a good developer. Written code is designed for human readability; the human should not be having to convert that mentally to its math equivalent to understand what operations are taking place. In nearly every possible case, this is at best a micro-optimization. At worst, a symptom of someone who writes unnecessarily obfuscated code to show off their knowledge in a manner that only hurts the maintainability of code by a team.

If I found bit shifting in an interview code sample as a replacement for basic multiplication, I would ask the developer why they chose to do it that way. They'll either a) calmly explain that their computer science classes taught it that way or it's a habit they've adopted after writing code for embedded systems or similar where the optimization actually made a difference, or b) their ego will make an appearance with a "because I'm so senior" attitude. The latter is not a good sign.

Or it's idiomatic for that language.

Sometimes x << 3 is more readable than x * 8. It depends on why you are doing the shift/multiply.