> punishing creativity

A similar thing happened to me once in an interview. They said use any language, but were a TS shop. I went with Python, which is hardly esoteric. The interviewers were seemingly unaware of the breadth and depth of Python’s stdlib, and so I demolished their questions in short order. I don’t remember specifics, only that I used heapq for something, and itertools for something else.

The reply afterwards was along the lines of, “while you clearly have a solid grasp on Python, we didn’t get good signals from the interview.”

It’s very much worth noting that this was for an infra role, DBs specifically. The most advanced algorithm I’ve ever had (and “had” is a stretch) to use is Levenshtein.

It is frustrating but it's not personal, it's just someone bad at their job.

This only happened once to me: I got a feedback of "jumped straight into a cloud-based solution". The funny part is that it was a company that made tooling for cloud services. Naturally they went bust.