I'm dealing with this now, having been interviewing for different engineering roles over the past two months. It hasn't been as bad as straight-up conceptual ma

I'm dealing with this now, having been interviewing for different engineering roles over the past two months. It hasn't been as bad as straight-up conceptual math problems, but there have been plenty of questions that I have questioned for validity. Interviewer: "How can we optimize the character replacement in a string such that we use no extra memory?" Me: "We do this and that and this. But, should we consider what situations we would need this optimization?" Interviewer: "What? Why?" I can now use this as a filter as I interview organizations. Optimizing algorithms by creating your own core data structure classes (instead of using the built-in ones) is great in certain circumstances, but an absolute waste of time in many others. And if you're not going to ask me about those times when making those improvements is important, then you're not asking questions for a programmer -- you're asking them for a theoretician who can recall syntax. It's poor practice, and I've seen it everywhere.