I am 100% fine with CS trivia interviews. I am fascinated by CS and can talk your ear off about it.
What I am not fine with is that you're judged entirely on that. My biggest complaint about this industry is not the CS trivia, it's that my entire job history is irrelevant. I have a decade in this industry and a staff title and I am still treated like a junior developer with no experience when I am interviewed. It's degrading and insulting. I can understand rigor in an interview at our average salary but the market is still firmly controlled by corporations despite what the media says about job prospects. Given that there are approximately 10-20 jobs per engineer in the industry right now, if we really cared, all we would have to do is just collectively say "no".
I really struggle with this, because on one hand I don't want to be the arrogant special snowflake kind of person, but on the other hand I also have a 15 year job history and 100k lines of code on GitHub, including some fairly widely used stuff. If you want to establish basic competency it's not hard.
So basically my solution is to just ghost people when they ignore the subtle "maybe look at my GitHub that you asked for to establish basic competency?" and start asking for coding tests because I neither want to do the test nor come off as a twat, and this seems like the "least bad" option. The truth of the matter is I have the time and can do it, I just don't feel like doing it; nothing more.
And I also consider it as a bit of an indication whether I want to work for them in the first place. "Rules must be followed, at all times" with zero flexibility or common sense is not really something I deal well with.
What I am not fine with is that you're judged entirely on that. My biggest complaint about this industry is not the CS trivia, it's that my entire job history is irrelevant. I have a decade in this industry and a staff title and I am still treated like a junior developer with no experience when I am interviewed. It's degrading and insulting. I can understand rigor in an interview at our average salary but the market is still firmly controlled by corporations despite what the media says about job prospects. Given that there are approximately 10-20 jobs per engineer in the industry right now, if we really cared, all we would have to do is just collectively say "no".