All depends on the nature of the work you're hiring for. The weakness I see with that approach is that I can't think of many workplaces where the main component

All depends on the nature of the work you're hiring for. The weakness I see with that approach is that I can't think of many workplaces where the main component of the job is solving 20-30 LOC algorithms. The correct answer to most sorting algo challenges in the real world is some variation on "use Array.sort" I'm more interested in how people interpret requirements, how they resource knowledge, how they architect their code, how they test it, etc. My recently retired pet challenge was to fetch and amalgamate responses from three different, unreliable, URLs and then return them in a single JSON document. For the web developers I was hiring it worked well.