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It may just be a hacker thing, but isn't everyone taking these interviews way too literally? They don't want someone who will always go for baroque when presented with a problem; they want someone who is at least capable of finding clever solutions.

It's a good proxy for IQ, which they can no longer legally test, but which correlates very strongly with job performance in a variety of tasks.

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True - but too many of these problem tasks one hears about are so stupid that it casts doubt on the technique. I would much rather be asked to tackle a real world problem (in code or as a spoken exercise) Indeed, being asked to solve silly riddles would persuade me to drop a job application. I would class such things alongside graphology and lie detector tests as strong counter indicators.

I've never been asked something like this in an interview. How much time do they give you to answer something like this?

They may want to standardize grading.

They may want to see how broadly you can apply information (e.g. if I were asking someone a finance question, I would not ask them to talk about stock options -- I'd ask them to talk about trading water rights, or valuing nonsmoking sections in a restaurant).

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