When someone asks what your biggest weakness is during an interview, and you don't answer honestly because the honest answer to these sorts of questions are socially unacceptable and isn't what the interviewer is looking for to begin with, is that cheating? Or is it taking into account the context of the question and answering the question the interviewer wanted answer? I could see how both answers are justified, and as such it would need to be clarified to know what is meant by your question.

What if current interview process heavily favours fast thinkers, memorizers and crammers? Shouldn't slow thinkers figure out a way to beat the system?

From a practical standpoint, who is hurt? In my day to day job, I would have Google, StackOverflow, ChatGPT (as long as I didn’t paste proprietary code or business logic), prior code samples from my previous job[1], etc.

But this is theoretical, I haven’t had a coding interview in over a decade and then only once and not for the prior decade before that. Even though I’ve always been a hands on keyboard coder.

I can’t imagine subjecting myself to a coding interview at almost 50 years old with the types of jobs I would be looking for if I left my current job (enterprise/cloud architecture + leading application development/cloud )

All of my prior jobs have come from just talking to people in charge of hiring (usually director/CxOs) and using my network.

My current job in cloud consulting (cloud app dev/“DevOps”) at $BigTech was all behavioral even though I have developed in 4 languages in the last three years.

[1] Future me: my company has a very straightforward open source process where we can get approved to put our code on our open source GitHub organization with an MIT license as long as we write it from scratch and doesn’t have any customer identifying information or business processes.