As an Engineering Manager, I find that solving this kind of problems really helps in my work, and it also helped to make our interview process more objective.

As an Engineering Manager, I find that solving this kind of problems really helps in my work, and it also helped to make our interview process more objective. When working with high-load systems, it kinda doesn't help that a person knows what "DRY"/"SOLID"/refactoring etc is. What helps is the ability to write code that handles corner cases and does it efficiently.