I try not to judge. If it's a company worth working for their contrived question usually has a point to it. A good example: a few years ago I was given a take-

I try not to judge. If it's a company worth working for their contrived question usually has a point to it. A good example: a few years ago I was given a take-home assignment for a language I had zero familiarity with it. I asked the recruiter about it, assuming it was a mistake, and she assured me it was intentional. Turns out the team had decided to optimize for people who can dive into complicated, unfamiliar domains and figure out a reasonably clean solution. In particular, this language had a feature explicitly for making problems of this sort easier and they were selecting for engineers who would be able figure that out. That's not to say every company does it well -- I'm sure there are many cargo-cult interviewers out there -- but I certainly wouldn't say it's "fucked".