Agreed - these questions are definitely more appropriate for research oriented positions. And actually, way more interesting in their own right than most programmer interview questions.
What rubs me the wrong way is when, applying for more or less "standard dev" jobs, one gets asked research-grade questions (i.e. "Solve this cute problem I was fed the solution to recently, either in grad school or in some handout my manager gave me just now. But which was actually an open problem in the literature for 5-10 years before a reasonable solution came down the pipe.")
For a job that ends up being, "Congratulations on making it through our interview process! Now would you mind debugging this {{horribly written X}} that no on here wants to touch with a 10-foot pole? Everyone here has to do 9-12 months of shitwork before moving on to anything interesting here, you see."
What rubs me the wrong way is when, applying for more or less "standard dev" jobs, one gets asked research-grade questions (i.e. "Solve this cute problem I was fed the solution to recently, either in grad school or in some handout my manager gave me just now. But which was actually an open problem in the literature for 5-10 years before a reasonable solution came down the pipe.")
For a job that ends up being, "Congratulations on making it through our interview process! Now would you mind debugging this {{horribly written X}} that no on here wants to touch with a 10-foot pole? Everyone here has to do 9-12 months of shitwork before moving on to anything interesting here, you see."