locklock

What are the chances that this has anything to do with merit? It's just another example of the same thing happening everywhere else in the American economy: people who are already rich taking more and more money for themselves, leaving much less for the rest of it. Of course there are people whose job it is to tell us that yes, these CEOs actually deserve this and have earned it, but that's just another part of the scam.

to be quite honest I would say this represents a lot of aspects of what's wrong with tech hiring. it's basically an abstract quiz, you're asking people to do random semi-related challenges while a clock ticks down and someone watches over their shoulder. this is basically zero percent representative of what actual coding is like and likely filtered out a few people who would have done well at whatever the actual job you're offering is.

it's not that the questions are too hard, it's that the whole challenge is bogus. if you have to ask these questions, make it a take-home challenge and discuss the implementation with people when they come to the in-person interview. being able to explain the hows and whys of already-written code is much more valuable than being able to write code under pressure, and much closer to what someone would actually be doing at work.

even better would be to figure out what exactly you're looking for in candidates and design the interviews to reflect that. right now it seems like you're looking for people who are good at coding under pressure... is that a normal part of the job? it very well might be, but i doubt it. think more about what you really want from people on a day-to-day basis.