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As someone interviewing for the first time in a long time I can tell you most assuredly that there are a disproportionate number of awful interviewers too.

Of the interviews I've had I would say about 3/4 have tried to catch you out with some inane gotcha that you would never see in the wild or have a very specific solution in mind without exploring or discussing. Sometimes both.

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I can attest. I've personally been shut out of two positions because I didn't say the "magic word" that the interviewer was looking for. In one instance, I kept using laymen's terms to describe an optical engineering process, because I knew they weren't optical engineers (far from it). They wanted me to say the precise technical phrase, but wouldn't explicitly ask that; they just kept asking questions around that phrase.

In another job where I was hired, I was tortured for over 10 minutes as one interviewer tried to get me to say the magic word. Fortunately, his manager was present, and shut down the questioning at that point. I never did learn what word the subordinate was trying to get me to say, but I was fully qualified for the job, and hired.

My more recent interviews have been fine, but for awhile I had several that were (in the words of xkcd) "communicating badly then acting smug when you're misunderstood".

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