The people "faking" it in this way likely actually know much less than someone who honestly struggles to come up with a poorly performing brute force solution

The people "faking" it in this way likely actually know much less than someone who honestly struggles to come up with a poorly performing brute force solution My office scores the people with the brute force solution higher than the others, so long as they know the time/space complexity. they practice the soft skills necessary to prevent the interview from ever getting to the point where you're asking questions about where the implementation can go wrong that aren't also on their script Oh yeah. That sounds familiar. Not getting to the part where they can answer questions about where the implementation can go wrong counts against them.