Dear Startups: stop asking me math puzzles to figure out if I can code

1) I think a lot of start-ups want to hire "smart" people. Because they expect the new person to eventually wear many hats. Objective-C, Java, Android, CSS, server side concurrency, monitoring. An we've all seen Hunter and Schmidt reference that tokenadult usually posts when talk about interviewing comes around and it does seem that a general mental ability test (like an IQ test) combined with a work samples seem to predict future performance of that employee. Well except that one can't just straight up give IQ test to job applicants (there is a court case about that). So we are left with a job sample (which many forget to give, as is the point of the author). But instead many focus on the GMA and create proxies for it -- cute little puzzles about blenders, round manhole covers, and other such silly things.

2) Those interviewing don't know the technical stuff and are afraid you'd out-bullshit them. "How does an Ajax request work" well if the interviewer themselves doesn't quite know the details the might not be able to evaluate it properly. They could have it written down but well, some technical questions have many different levels of depth that a candidate might descent to. So a quick written answer to the question might seem wrong but it is really because the candidate is more advanced. So puzzles seems to be a generic and "easier" to handle.

I tend to hate the interviews that ask me to solve math and logic brainteasers because I don't see the value in them regarding my knowledge of programming.

But honestly, why can't we just start giving IQ tests? Or at least asking for SAT scores? We shouldn't have to run through training puzzles just to prove we're smart enough to build a site.

On the other extreme, testing knowledge of language syntax is just as bad. A smart programmer will be able to figure out the syntax of any language in short order, especially if it belongs to the same class of a language with which they are already familiar (such as functional vs imperative, dynamic vs static).

An effective interview process would test both reasoning and coding capabilities, and it can be done simultaneously -- i.e. code the solution to reasoning puzzles.

There can be an air of intellectual masturbation to some programming interviews. Lots of otherwise reasonably smart people are close-minded about what is predictive of productivity on the job, and I think that is the real issue that this article should address.