I remain unconvinced. I still think brain teasers help understand one's decisions. A tangent to this subject is Google's famous post-mortems. An incident X o

I remain unconvinced. I still think brain teasers help understand one's decisions. A tangent to this subject is Google's famous post-mortems. An incident X occurred - what did the team do? What processes were in place to minimize risk, etc? Was there anything that the team didn't think about? (Unfortunately most of the time these things are taught by experience and in production.) An so on. It might seem bogus but sometimes it's not. Reliability in certain domains is very important because sometimes human lives are at risk. nobody in their right mind would let software engineers design airplanes. I never said anything of the sort. Software engineers do have to know certain aspects of its domain problem otherwise the software controlling the hardware will be fundamentally broken. When I was kid I thought maths were pointless - because I couldn't see how that would be applied to real tangible things - until it suddenly clicked how it all worked (this happened because I started reading more about it and actually finding interest in it). Brain teasers help one think even if the scenario at first seems completely random and bogus, and yes even "trick" questions are valid. This new standard of thinking, about these problems as a waste of time, is probably related to something else; probably politics and the feeling that those said brain teasers are considered by some as "elitist" (or white as they call it now). If that is the case then how about explaining things to people in other ways? I'm a big proponent of educating the masses. (Something like what the Khan Academy or 3Blue1Brown are doing.) Another reason might be because people feel anxious about job interviews already and having stranger shove in a brain teaser makes the whole experience even more stressful. If that's the case then maybe this person is in the wrong field or applying to the wrong company/job. Or maybe that person needs to solve other life's problems before applying to any job that's stressful.