I’ve seen this before. Very recently I saw a candidate rejected based only on the fact that they were rattled by a word-search problem (find words in a letter grid) on a whiteboarding test. It was frustrating to me, as I had seen this person’s production code at a previous job and witnessed them successfully working problems.

“I just can’t hire someone who fails this sort of problem”.

Given that this person was applying for a general backend position building foundational, framework derived features (mostly CRUD and some light analytics) it was confusing to me. There is literally zero application for graph traversal in their work. They will absolutely never encounter this sort of problem in the course of developing our software...which is b2b, targeted at industry experts: we build software that generates reports. Not even complex aggregates...just moving window averages and the like.

At this point in my career, after building more than one team/business I’ve learned that the shape of your technical interview loop informs not just the codebase you generate...but also your engineering culture.