( Opinions are my own ) Anacdata: last year I passed the interview at Google. I completely failed to solve one of my coding interview questions. I demonstrated

( Opinions are my own ) Anacdata: last year I passed the interview at Google. I completely failed to solve one of my coding interview questions. I demonstrated I knew what to do but I attempted a fancy way to write the code and it didn't pan out. Completely fell on my ass. Other interviews went very well though. Only comment I got was "X said your code was a little messy" because I used python generators + list comprehensions. You can totally fail a question in a tight time slot if the process is built right. What is stupid is the variability in opinions if interviews. This one dude disliked list comprehensions so much he lowered his rating of me despite this being a normal thing for python programmers. You have no way to know if you hit a nerve ahead of time for an interview and it sucks. I had similar things happen with things like discussing the C spec with interviewers in questions like "what happens when you dereference a pointer to 0" and then you have to say "you want me to say segfault but this depends on the vmm and ring your process is running on".