I hate puzzles too, but that's primarily because I never know the answers :) On a serious note though, it is quite possible that companies use puzzles as a scre

I hate puzzles too, but that's primarily because I never know the answers :) On a serious note though, it is quite possible that companies use puzzles as a screening technique because they are not looking for you. Specifically, they are looking for not you. Think about it, a big company needs an employee that would join them and work for at least 18 months in order to pay back the costs of hiring, but preferably stay for 3-4-5 years... as many as years as possible, if this is a good hacker we are talking about. Hiring someone who's likely to leave in 6 months is counter productive for a large company, and puzzles is one way to keep you away. You'd have to ask someone who was at Facebooks and Googles in their early days and see if the hiring was based on puzzles. I suspect in those times a lot of decisions were made in much similar ways to how you'd want to do it now. Puzzles are not the answer, and large companies would probably agree with you too, but it's a tool that seems to work best for them and it's scalable to achieve a consisten outcome over a long term horizon. Precisely what large companies need.