There is a fundamental disconnect of reasoning here. What we are expected to believe is that these people at their "big, name-brand companies" are carrying on a

There is a fundamental disconnect of reasoning here. What we are expected to believe is that these people at their "big, name-brand companies" are carrying on an elaborate hoax on their employers and their inability to do blank page coding exercises reveals their fundamental uselessness. Possibly, the truth might be that the majority of serious work is done under conditions where you are used to your framework and, frankly, can easily forget how exactly to fire up a editor and write code to solve a toy problem. One might say this reflects more poorly on the interview process than the interviewee. The idea that there is some special magic "creativity" involved in this kind of blank sheet programming that is never required when programming within a well-established framework is pure hokum. We have a lot of well-established practices in our code base that allow us to bust out a new and sophisticated graph analysis or transformation in precious few lines of code - meanwhile, the blank sheet guys are self-congratulating because they know how to call glib's hash functions in a clean sheet environment. B... F... D... (and I don't mean the library)