Well, given some of the code I have seen, I would have a sneaking suspicion that clean code was not the hallmark of this company's source code. They are also probably asking these type of questions because they use some of these "cool techniques" in their code. I then start having a flashback to some code in 98 that I had to debug at 2AM to get the damn batch job out by 6AM that turned out to be some really "clever code"[1]. Yeah, I might checkout early and run for the parking lot.

1) said right there in the comment, but not why or how it was clever or what it really did