I encourage anyone to stand their ground on this. Competing with liars is an enormous soft-skill challenge. But it doesn’t exercise critical thinking. Structuring a personal plan that builds those soft skills is really annoying. Especially if you just want to solve complex problems all day.

That said,

- the interviewer likely embellished or lied to get his job. Be careful.

- a lot of this thread is about avoiding a bad hire. In engineering, someone technical who can detect deception is too valuable to put in the interviewer role. Send them to conferences to “poach”.

Just like the soft skills of competing with liars, you can also improve detecting deception.