Speaking as one person who has been interviewing developers (and others) for 20 years, getting to specifics is something I try to do in every interview. It's j

Speaking as one person who has been interviewing developers (and others) for 20 years, getting to specifics is something I try to do in every interview. It's just not that difficult to B.S. your way through an interview with great-sounding generalities even when you don't know how to actually do anything (think FizzBuzz). It's also an actual problem in real life that some people would rather live in the abstract and never want get into the details of actually getting work done. The only way I know to clarify that in an interview is to drill way deep into the specifics of something you've done. If you actually did the work, and knew what you were doing, then that'll be pretty obvious -- and you can certainly motivate the specifics with principles as you go. However, quite often I have to really push to get the specifics even if they are there. People don't expect that I want to be bored with details, or something. So I've learned to be very explicit that I want boring details, lots of them. It sounds like the interviewers in this case didn't do that, whether deliberately or not.