Depending on the job, interviewer gripes may be legitimate, or at least they should give you the opportunity to write a different type of solution. If they’re

Depending on the job, interviewer gripes may be legitimate, or at least they should give you the opportunity to write a different type of solution. If they’re writing a compartmentalized library specific to their domain, it’s fine. I’ve worked with a Stats PhD doing that. If you’re dropping them into a shared codebase, the comprehensibility of their code to the other people on their team is essential. Great code that depends on knowledge no one else on the team has is not great. You end up with “That’s going to take forever to change, Steve wrote it”.