Is it normal for senior technical roles to skip deep dives into core skills?

The short answer is that for large infrastructure firms, that initial screen isn't designed to test your grid stability knowledge; it's a corporate filter for cognitive ability and cultural fit. These companies often get hundreds of applications for a single lead role, and they need to quickly triage whether you can handle the pressure and communicate effectively before they waste a senior domain expert's time. The goal of that first call is determining if you're trainable and if you can hold a professional conversation, not if you can design a three-phase distribution system from memory. So if they ask a weird lateral thinking puzzle, they are checking your problem-solving approach and your ability to think on your feet under stress, because those are soft skills they can't easily measure in a resume. It’s a screening process designed for maximum efficiency on the employer's end, not the candidate's. I've seen this in high-level software architecture roles too, where they will ask you non-technical scenarios just to see how you justify a decision, even if the decision is stupid. If you can't articulate your thought process clearly during that brief interaction, they assume you won't be able to write a clear technical proposal later on, which is often thier biggest fear. It isn't usually a reflection of your actual engineering expertise, but rather their attempt to filter a sea of applicants down to a manageable handful for the technical round.

Gotta push back on the idea that a lateral thinking puzzle tells them anything useful. Those puzzles mostly test wether you've seen the puzzle before. I bombed one years ago at a power plant job becuase I'd never heard the trick, then a buddy told me the answer in two minutes and I felt like an idiot. Meanwhile the guy who got the role just happened to have read the same brain teaser collection. My actual interviews that led to real offers were the ones where an engineer asked me to whiteboard a one-line diagram I'd genuinely drawn before. That's what predicts whether someone can do the work, not riddles.

The first reply nails it. Same thing happened to me a couple years back, phone screen with a utility contractor felt like a total waste of fifteen minutes, guy barely let me finish a sentence about my background. I almost withdrew. Then the technical panel a week later was three hours of genuinely hard questions with the people who'd actualy be my coworkers. Turns out the screeners don't know a thing about the work themselves, they're just checking if you sound like someone worth passing along. My advice is just to give clear short answers and save your real substance for the second round, that's where it counts.

Update: talked to a few people I know who've been through this company's pipeline, and yeah, they all said the same thing about the screen being just a gatekeeper. One guy also mentioned bombing a riddle-type question early on and still getting the offer, which matches what someone said here about those puzzles only testing whether you've heard the trick before. My question now: is it normal to ask the recruiter upfront what the technical rounds will actually cover, or does that come off badly?