I used to rail against this practice of using CS-y questions as hiring filters.. but I think now I get it. I just got a take home test from a start up where I

I used to rail against this practice of using CS-y questions as hiring filters.. but I think now I get it. I just got a take home test from a start up where I had to find all bounding boxes in a 2d array of chars, filter out the overlapped (or contained boxes), and return the largest non-overlapping box.. whew. I wrote it with a recursive traversal to find each bounding box (something I thought was clever), in scala (their language of choice, although I could choose any), within a few hours on a weekend, and I still didn't get the job. Evidently, missed some edge cases, but in their view generally worked for the most part. Obviously, this isn't remotely close to what I'd (ever) possibly do there (it's a web portal.. or something), but I can see why it was used. It's like the SAT, it's something that can be cheaply deployed with immediate feedback. You don't really have to guess if this guy/girl is going to hack the basics. Now clearly it doesn't really control for any sort of specifics of experience, other than how you think, and how you put together a specific solution. They need to filter on something, other than a gut feel, or a good conversation. They're in the business of software development, so I guess this is (at least) some objective measure of that. What might be interesting is to know how many FAANG wash-outs there are, despite doing really well on these tests. I wonder if it's close to what the normal attrition rates would be at other companies.. maybe none of that really applies.