I understand where you're coming from; it can be frustrating that all doctoral work doesn't count to some interviewers as much as a canned test. At Facebook we

I understand where you're coming from; it can be frustrating that all doctoral work doesn't count to some interviewers as much as a canned test. At Facebook we constantly work on improving the interview quality for PhD candidates. Our recruiters do a great job at having PhDs interviewed by PhDs of the same speciality (last count we had some 120 PhD employees in engineering). My own employment interview involved three ML/NLP interviewers and one very tough systems/coding interviewer. I had to write code in two of the interviews. In the story you give there's probably a mismanagement of expectations. The company should have clarified to you that either they need their researchers to code in addition to doing research (as is the case at Facebook), or that they only care about coding.