I have concluded the main value of these tests and interview puzzles is humiliation. It's like a fraternity hazing -- if you can survive without losing your coo

I have concluded the main value of these tests and interview puzzles is humiliation. It's like a fraternity hazing -- if you can survive without losing your cool you get to join the club. If you've been hired after one of these nasty tech interviews you've probably sat around with your new co-workers hearing them make fun of the candidates who didn't make the grade. If someone interviewing you has a CS degree from MIT they may want to show off to you and everyone else how much they know and how clever they are. It's possible the job requires deep computer science expertise, but most programming jobs simply don't. A few years ago Google -- famous for their tech interviews -- revealed that they had found no correlation between the interview tests and puzzles and job performance. My own experience (36 years) working with many, many programmers in all kinds of environments is that some are good at puzzles and enjoy them, and others aren't. It doesn't appear to have much to do with their ability to write the bread-and-butter type of code that most of us spend our careers writing. Sure, it's good (maybe essential in some contexts) to know if an algorithm is O(n) or O(n^2). I've worked on projects where recognizing a better algorithm made the code faster or cleaner. But these are edge cases for most programmers, who are mostly shuffling data from one format to another and trying to get their build system to run on their laptop. Of course you can ask the interviewers what they expect to learn from sweating you over puzzles, or how many times they have had to move Mt. Fuji in their day-to-day work, but challenging the interview process is probably not going to help your prospects.