I think people are over-estimating the difficulty because they're thinking about how difficult it would be for them to pass this interview. The typical backgro

I think people are over-estimating the difficulty because they're thinking about how difficult it would be for them to pass this interview. The typical background for someone applying for this sort of job would have 5-10 years spent at a management consultancy firm, maybe a few years at an investment bank and an MBA. They'll have read thousands of business case studies and written dozens or hundreds themselves. They'll have seen a number of LBO/IPO deals and will have spent hundreds of hours studying how these are structured. These are the kind of people who when they read about a company automatically start thinking about market sizing and modelling. Not being able to do a case study in an interview would be like a programming interviewee not being able to solve a trivial problem like FizzBuzz. And as for the timing, it's just testing something that anyone with the appropriate background should be able to breeze through. If you're meeting with a C-Level client, running over your allocated time is incredibly rude, if you can't manage your time in an interactive discussion situation then you don't belong in the industry. The whole article just sounds like it's based on the rants of a candidate who wasn't capable of doing the job they were applying for.