I think you'll find startups to be more flexible on this, with the downside that they are often still figuring out their own processes. At Nylas we ask a range

I think you'll find startups to be more flexible on this, with the downside that they are often still figuring out their own processes. At Nylas we ask a range of questions from high to low level but all related to the kinds of problems engineers would be working on - for example, if you'd be working on the platform team, we ask you about things like concurrency and locks because we actually use those, not because we read some CS 101 textbook and thought they'd be cool. Sometimes, the goal of an interview is to get you to think about something you don't know. If you knew every answer to every interview question perfectly, what does the interviewer learn? It's quite enlightening to get out of that comfort zone and see whether someone pulls an answer out of their backside, honestly says that they don't know, or somewhere in between. I'm not saying all interviews should be like this for everyone, and I think interviewers should be very much aware if that's what they're doing -- which I think is less the case ("oh, the candidate didn't use a linked list but solved the problem some other way? 0 points!").