For me, puzzles are 50/50. I'm not employed by the Big 4, it's not a goal of mine, but with some effort I'm confident I could land a job there. The issue with

For me, puzzles are 50/50. I'm not employed by the Big 4, it's not a goal of mine, but with some effort I'm confident I could land a job there. The issue with puzzles is that they're not relevant to any of the work I do, and if they are it's tangential. I probably lack some insights that people who code day in and day out do, but I doubt it. I was in Austin over the weekend for a tech presentation thing, and I overheard this conversation: * P1: So what are you working on now? * P2: Oh, I'm working for a shadow startup * P1: Nice, what's the stack? * P2: It's redis, NodeJS and (something I don't remember) * P1: Cool, that's awesome To me that sounded like brogrammer culture talk. And P2 turned out to be the one giving the presentation. At the end, I wasn't impressed, there were several mistakes, like giving people who are just starting out code that didn't run, and never trying to run the code in the first place. I asked that we run the code before everyone was dismissed and everyone walked out with a working version I lost my original point, but it's unlikely sucking at puzzles makes you any bad. Take any criticism in stride, it's unlikely to be a personal reflection of you, defend a point if you have it. You are not your job. Find a hobby?