There's a broken culture of companies thinking they should only hire the smartest people in the world. Most companies don't need brilliant people, they need co

There's a broken culture of companies thinking they should only hire the smartest people in the world. Most companies don't need brilliant people, they need competent people who will work great together. [Disclaimer of bitterness: I'm not one of the smartest people in the world. I get rejected after one to three interviews all the time. The author of the post is right: nobody ever looks at your online code and your resume only gets read once by HR to set up the initial pre-interview.] Testing for concrete intro-to-CS level drivel may give you a company full of people who spend 30 hours a week doing topcoder or project euler, but... you don't need that (if you do need that, good for you, but most companies don't). It also tricks the interviewee a bit -- "Oh, they're asking algorithms questions! Maybe this'll be a fun CS research job." [six months into the job] "Uh... all I've done is write SQL and fully library-driven backend website code. Boring."