My best explanation is that a lot of programmers have Asperger's syndrome, and in a pinch, some of them will be called upon to take part in an interview loop.

My best explanation is that a lot of programmers have Asperger's syndrome, and in a pinch, some of them will be called upon to take part in an interview loop. I once had an interview where the interviewer asked me to write him a partial template specification in C++. Any time I gave him anything that wasn't exactly right syntactically, he would just say "uh uh," with no further feedback. I did eventually get it, at which point he moved on to bit manipulation questions, which I must admit were somewhat outside the box of what one normally expect from an interview, so I'll give him credit for that. Needless to say, I didn't get the job. Later that day, I Googled the interviewer, and found his home page, which had a collection of clever bit twiddling hacks he'd collected over the years. I guess that's important or something.