Personally, I failed the ITA puzzle. (Either I failed it or they looked at my resume post-fact and decided I wasn't smart or qualified enough... probably a comb

Personally, I failed the ITA puzzle. (Either I failed it or they looked at my resume post-fact and decided I wasn't smart or qualified enough... probably a combination). So, here is my opinion as a non-halfway-decent programmer. I thought puzzle was fairly fun, but I like programming for two reasons: * Building useful knowledge. Learning a new language, library, or algorithm I want to play with, programming is the natural way to learn. * Building cool stuff that people like. Having an awesome product when I'm done with it gives the feeling that I've done a good job and produced something of value. Programming puzzles don't really do either of these things for me. My motivation for spending three hours doing a puzzle is that I would like to talk to a person. I am basically assured that the puzzle will be used as a filter for the company to avoid talking to people. It will run against a test suite and if it fails it will not be looked at by anybody. This seems very impersonal. Is this the experience I should expect from the rest of the company if I'm hired? I've got a Git-hub account with some of my code in it. I've spent time on it and enjoyed writing all of that code. I published it to the internet so I'm (at very least) not ashamed of it. Why can't you look at that to determine if I can program? Why do I have to write code specifically for your particular company? This isn't an attack on ITA, it seems to work for them. But they are a unique case of a company where it seemed worth it for me to spend the time to do the puzzle. Any other company I would have just skipped it unless I genuinely had nothing better or more interesting to do (of which I almost always do).