I might get lot of flak for this, but everytime I see a post criticising the software engineering interview process I'm thinking what is this dude trying to sell.

The interview process is an assessment on your programming knowledge and its also an assessment on whether you'd be able to hang mentally (intellectually) around the people within the organization (read culture).

If the culture of the organization is made of people who are very proficient in computer science theory. It is imperative they'd would expect any new individual to at least be like them. That's human nature!