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Comment by milemi
Sometimes there's no time to google, and you want to be talking to someone while you're doing it, as a sanity check. https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/08/02/knight-capital-says-...
$10M/minute is an extreme case, but these things happen on a smaller scale all the time.
I'm not saying this is the justification for coding interviews, just saying that it happens, and the ability to code something up quickly that also works correctly without having time to test it sometimes saves the day.
I do think coding interviews that people are complaining about are good, and getting in shape to do well in them is good for you. You can tell it's good for you just by the amount of complaining people are doing :)