Back when I interviewed at MS as a college senior, I had no clue about these "formats". So when someone asked me how I would make (I think they meant design) a web crawler, I started writing one in Python. They didn’t stop me, and it seemed to be awkward to them that I was doing this, whereas I felt awkward that they were acting that way when I was doing what they asked. It was just stupid all around. These systems deserve to be gamed, and the interviewers can't handle anything else, like in TFA.