The article assumes that only an "easy" real-life scenario will fit in an interview's timeframe. That is only true if you select scenarios unaltered.
A truly challenging real-life scenario can fit just fine after some alterations.
A truly challenging real-life scenario can fit just fine after some alterations.
I'm intensely suspicious of people who believe that this isn't possible.
One company asked me to find a bug in a library in a language of my choice out of a small list of languages in a bit under an hour. So I pick a language from a list of languages none of which I use regularly, and until the interview I was not sure which of dozens of combinations of tooling will be used by the project. It seemed like a reasonably sized bug that someone who was not worried about time pressure and had worked on a project tthar used the same tooling could reasonably do in the time given. So I failed, and I passed comparably difficult sections at other companies that I did not want to work at as much.
Seems like this is where they went wrong...
I had this happen to me in one interview https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13295212 using Python which I didn't know very well. Despite it not working out I thought it was one of the better interviews I've had.
If you give it to somebody you know you'd want to hire and they take 4+ hours to do a 1 hour task that's kind of a red flag. I'll bet your company didn't test their test.