My current gig interviews were all deep storage strategy conversations and hard in the sense of needing to show a lot of knowledge articulately. I left there feeling really good if exhausted.
My Google interviews were hard in the sense of embarrassing regurgitation and thinking nonsense on one's feet. Hard was being made to feel inferior.
I had an interview experience, where the interviewer was looking for a particular answer. I give him 3 answers to his design issue. Then the interviewer says he was looking for the 2nd answer I gave him, as if I didn't just say it.
It's one thing to reach and fail. It's another thing to be in a context where the truth of what you know doesn't even matter.
I think the next time I see it, I'm just going to question whether this is how they behave in their job too, even if it means ending the interview right there.
How is this distinguishable from the interviewer hearing something from the candidate where an understandable reaction is to stay silent and look dubious? I've had candidates try to tell me something like: a null pointer member of a struct in C++ takes up no data. The first part of what you described was my natural reaction, not a hazing strategy. (I then went on to ask if they were sure about that.)
The warm up question was difficult and I was completely embarrassed that I didn't some it right away. As I walked out I knew for certain that was not a warm up question and was pissed that he had consciously shaken my confidence right off the bat.
How do you know it wasn't just a badly written question? Interviewing is hard in the same way that teaching and writing is. It's hard to put yourself into another person's shoes. Never ascribe malice where incompetence is a sufficient explanation.