You don't need something "truly novel" to have a market advantage. Far from it. You just need something that is not ready made. Remember that not every algori

You don't need something "truly novel" to have a market advantage. Far from it. You just need something that is not ready made. Remember that not every algorithm is neatly package-able, or has a cool name like "Stable Marriage Problem" or "Levenshtein Distance". Also: maybe your advantage is implementing some of those in a new language. Maybe your advantage is implementing one of those in SQL! Maybe you have a tree-like or graph-like structure, and you need to do something with it without having to export into some format expected by certain packages. Knowing what to implement is important too. Also, those interviews are often testing for something even simpler than those fancy algorithms. Nobody uses Fizz Buzz or Recursive Fibonacci daily, but you might need to implement something that is beyond creating views/models/controllers in your favourite MVC framework. This is what the test is checking for: coding beyond what's on the README of your framework.