Someone else above in the thread believes there is "great value" in being able to accomodate complexity, what the commenter refers to as a "general" solution, as well as this being worth any cost in performance. God help you if these are the type of people who are doing the interviews. Despite pedantic technical questions, I doubt they are actually screening for crucial skills like reducing complexity. Rather, the expectation is that the tech worker will tolerate complexity, including the "solutions" to managing it that are themselves adding more complexity, e.g., abstraction.