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I wasn't there, so I can't know how the interview went, but are you sure the motivation was "just to prove how smart he was" ? If I'm already 100% sure I'll re

I wasn't there, so I can't know how the interview went, but are you sure the motivation was "just to prove how smart he was" ? If I'm already 100% sure I'll recommend a hire, it's not rare for me to go off-script and dig into random stuff in the candidate's experience, first of all because I find it interesting or fun to talk about, and second because having deep knowledge about anything is positive signal, regardless of whether it's useful for the job. I have definitely been in this scenario and asked people who had relevant background to work out low-level performance details of their code. I hope they didn't think I was "drilling" them.

scarface74 7y ago
My (would be) manager who was also technical (he has since self demoted to an IC role after his kids graduated college) was already satisfied. It was one of the other devs who was sitting in. I think he asked me something about the difference between undefined and implementation defined behavior and the an example of each. This was in 2015. I had the same question when it was relevant for an interview in 1999. I’ve geeked out with another hiring manager at an interview about some old 8 bit coding I did but that felt different.