Puzzle-Based Interviews

Puzzle interviews largely miss common engineering responsibilities such as diagnosing problems, reading unfamiliar code, using documentation, understanding constraints, and changing real codebases. Puzzle interviews mainly test writing new code from scratch, which the article frames as the smallest part of the job. Traditional coding challenges do not reflect most professional software work. Puzzle-heavy developer interviews often assess memorization, stress tolerance, and preparation time rather than everyday engineering ability. The article says there is no published proof that elite coding-test scores reliably predict good engineering performance.