Most of these live programing exercises are far too demanding when you consider the stressful environment and the time pressure that candidates are under. It se

Most of these live programing exercises are far too demanding when you consider the stressful environment and the time pressure that candidates are under. It selects for a certain kind of fresh-out-of-uni candidate who has been solving puzzles every week as part of their assessments. Once you've been out of university for almost a decade, some things fade from memory and you need more time to solve those puzzles because you can't rely on your 'muscle memory' like a recent graduate can. These puzzles say nothing about a candidate's problem solving ability, they're just monkey tricks that can be rehearsed. Who is smarter; a candidate who can solve a Rubik's Cube after seeing it for the first time or someone who has rehearsed it hundreds of time and knows the algorithms? It's not even fair to compare these two people, the former is unequivocally a very intelligent person and the latter could potentially still be an idiot... This is true even if the second person could solve it in one tenth of the time in front of an audience while blindfolded and riding a unicycle across a plank suspended in mid-air above crocodile-infested waters. And this barely scratches the surface of what's wrong with tech companies' hiring processes. This puzzle-solving ability is overvalued and the ability to design/architect good systems (I.e. seeing the big picture and using common sense) is extremely undervalued.