I agree with you on the idea that is definitely seems crazy to ask for this sort of prep from job seekers, and I also agree that such things do not do a great j

I agree with you on the idea that is definitely seems crazy to ask for this sort of prep from job seekers, and I also agree that such things do not do a great job of directly testing real world work skills. However, I've worked for a couple of companies that had this sort of interview process, and I've worked for a couple of companies that did not, and I found that the quality of engineers working for the former is substantially higher than the quality of engineers working for the latter. Correlation, of course, is not causation, and there are many other reasons this could be the case. It could be that the sort of companies that tend to attract good engineers happen to all have a cargo cult-like obsession to this interview pattern, and good engineers actively seek it out. Or it could be that the sort of person who does well on these types of questions tend to also do well at programming by chance. Perhaps you could get nearly as good results by just asking candidates to, I dunno, build the tallest structure out of straws that they can manage in fifteen minutes. Whatever the reason that it works, in my experience it definitely seems to. I'd love to hear suggestions for an alternative solution, though. Good ideas I've heard in the past involve things like pair programming on a real assignment for a day, although it's sometimes difficult to scale that to the number of interviews these companies need to conduct.