[hexa00]

This is crazy and needs to stop indeed it's like you have:

- A degree (In which you've proven you can understand these algos and spent 4 years studying)

  I'm not going to redo all that in 1 week before your stupid puzzle!

- Experience (That has to be worth something it's not like everyone is lying about it)

- You may have open source contributions

But no, some companies will not even start to look at that or not look at all, before they ask you this stupid puzzle.

Personally I now filter those companies out, I mean 20 years of experience, contributions in major open source projects, if you can't recognize that? why would I interview?

Were I work now we give code assignments, while they take longer to do you can actually see structure which I agree with the author is the top quality I'm looking for. They are also less stressful for the candidate.

[_gabe_]

> A degree (In which you've proven you can understand these algos and spent 4 years studying)

Unfortunately this means next to nothing anymore. I have a bachelor's degree in CS and Math, and I found it very useful. However, I host a fairly large community and provide tutorials on coding projects. I've had several people working on a masters thesis in CS reach out to me because they're following one of my tutorials for the thesis. They then ask a very basic question that indicates they don't know how a package manager works, or how to look up documentation on a library. I think these two tasks are some of the most basic programming tasks available, and if you can make it through 5-6 years of college in CS and still not have the most basic understanding of this, then a degree means absolutely nothing anymore.

Some more anecdata, I've had several friends who graduated with me and can hardly code. It's unfortunate, but I think degrees are just an expensive piece of useless paper that tells you absolutely nothing about the individuals abilities.