Hiring the Smartest People in the World

Better title: Acing The Interview Doesn’t Mean You’ll Be Hired. No explanation why though. Envy?

"The problems were so difficult that he wanted to sit with me and read them together to make sure that I understood them"

That sounds slightly condescending to me, especially as the problems don't sound that complex to describe and he is a mathematician! It doesn't surprise me that someone who takes that attitude reacts badly to someone easily solving a problem that they couldn't.

Because being able to solve puzzle problems isn't actually a good predictor of employee quality? (It remains an open question why interviewers use them at all in that case.)

Many interviewers do not (in reality) want to employ people who are obviously better than them, whatever they may say in public?

People tend to hire, not so much the best people they can find, but the people who are most like themselves.

And if you hire people like yourself, and your job ad says "We hire the smartest people," then you must be the smartest people! I've found it to be a huge negative signal. These sorts of interviews seem to mostly be about developers patting themselves on the back about how they stumped the applicants in interviews.

I think we need to have the talk about the "hire the smartest developers" meme in our industry like the web hosting industry talks about five 9s of uptime. The first nine is writing FizzBuzz. The second nine is being able to design and maintain large systems. The third nine is knowing the finer points of Prim's and Dijkstra's and a copy of TAOCP with arbitrary dust coating on the shelf.

Do you really need talent that meets a higher standard than that? Maybe if you are Google or NASA. But if you are not launching things into space, you don't need to hire the world's smartest people. Certainly, there is a spectrum between 'we write CRUD software' vs 'we read journals and do some novel algorithms work', and a company in the second category will want to say something positive about the intelligence of their employees as a signal. But "we hire the smartest people" is absolutely the wrong thing to say.

"Smarter" is not even better once you've hit the threshold of "acceptable number of nines to write this program." I routinely pass over hiring extremely smart people. Some of them have abrasive personalities, or are the wrong cultural fit, or are not interested in the problem domain, etc.

The problem wasn't misstated, when they aren't in order the solution isn't obvious unless you remember a bit about sums. Most interview problems, if restricted, can either be solved very quickly, or aren't interesting anymore. Either way, as it was stated, it's a fairly common interview question as another comment has pointed out.