It's not one or ther other; many interviews assess both because they're both meaningful signals about a candidate. If you're coming from the position that one

It's not one or ther other; many interviews assess both because they're both meaningful signals about a candidate. If you're coming from the position that one is "understand and assess and write and communicate a deep set of domain-specific knowledge" and the other is "on the fly recursive algo regurgitation" then it will be hard to change your mind about any of this. --- You could have just as easily called system design interviews regurgitation and coding interviews "communicating deep domain-specific knowledge".