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by esco27 570 days ago
No, you’ve just optimized for a lazy metric. You’re filtering for people who can handle trivia under pressure, not necessarily good engineers.
3 comments

If you are applying for a job in the front office of an NBA franchise, and I ask you "which team did Michael Jordan play for?", answering with "this is a useless trivia question, it is beneath me, I can easily google it, how does it matter?" will mean you are not going any further in the interview. You can then complain about it online all you want, but that's how it is.

Similarly, if I ask you "write a program in your language of choice that prints all even numbers from 1 to 100", you can either cry about it or take the 3 minutes and actually do it. If you can't, it's a pretty clear signal that you don't actually write code in your day job and aren't suited for this one.

Why would someone be under pressure when answering "basic fizzbuzz or reverse a string level questions"? Personally I like easy and quick warmup questions, they make me more calm
It's not trivia, it's basic problem solving skills of the trade.