Thats certainly invalid. People with 20 years of experience or more, are asked questions based upon the role they are interviewing for.
If you are applying for a principal or higher engineer role and your job involves coding, you are asked coding questions. May be not just focused on a complex bookish algorithm only, but rather more close to a real life distributed programming / synchronization problem etc. for example.
No way they even considered doing it... That's for people out of college...