It's disheartening really, isn't it, that an engineer is judged by how well they can memorize, by rote, the solution to an esoteric puzzle that likely will never come up in the entire career.

Sure, there's merit in recognizing the structure of a problem and potential solutions in terms of data structures and algorithms but their implementation, well, that's mostly just reinventing the wheel at this point unless you're in R&D or make rockets.

I'll continue "pushing back," as the management droids say, against this noise and will always have a conversation and be employing the person who's well rounded, filled with curiosity, knows the version number of sed, and doesn't answer immediately with a cookie cutter solution!