[failwhaleshark]

That's the way to do it. Carefully dissect the ambiguous signals potential employers emit throughout their process, and form an impression around the time of an offer so you know if you'd keep negotiating.

Too often, the interviewers are just trying to emulate seeming smart out of some ego thing, haven't been trained how to interview and just emulate what they think they're supposed to do, or are too lazy to ask real-world questions.

IIRC from CS, every recursion problem can be turned into an iterative one. Even many production compilers contain handmade parsers are recursive primarily for maintainability, not for technical reasons. There are plenty of ways to make bottom-up parsers (LALR parser generators) that don't use recursion but they aren't as useful at generating diagnostics, especially explaining parse error reasons in human-readible language.

Also: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/im-getting-too-old-for-this-s...