3. Weird extra steps It is not really that weird. Puzzles or math problems are just a faster and highly probable measure of one's aptitude not just for the sill

3. Weird extra steps It is not really that weird. Puzzles or math problems are just a faster and highly probable measure of one's aptitude not just for the silly puzzle but how sharp you are even in business decisions. The mind has to be sharp. Trust me this is as important as knowing if you did multi-threaded cluster based algorithm blah blah. Puzzles as a selection criteria - there will be false positives but too few false negatives. Recently I was hiring for an online marketing position where being sharp with math actually matters, a lot. The candidate of 2 yr experience refused to take a screening test on aptitude. Very well, rejected as we have no data points of how sharp he was.