Funny, a lot of the technical questions I had to do in pre-screens and in the interview itself were naturally solved via recursion and were what the interviewer was looking for. This is both with Google and large financial companies.
Like I said, the interviewer who asked me to convert recursion to iteration, who knew something about it beyond "Dirty!", was a great guy with whom I had a great time. The fact that my quite-sufficient-in-his-opinion algorithmic skills ended up not being what his company actually needed doesn't change that it was a wonderful interview.
