That section was less complaining about the nature of the problem and more about the harshness of judging the solution. The irrelevance to day-to-day work merely emphasizes the unfairness of the judgement.
If I'm put on the spot, under time pressure, to solve a problem I've never seen before and will likely never see again on the job, AND you reject me because my solution was slightly incorrect or naive, well it's obvious what the nature of the job is at that point. You're filtering for candidates that can and will devote dozens of hours to Cracking the Coding Interview and LeetCode. Sorry, I have a full-time engineering job and two young kids, and you clearly don't value my capabilities or experience or time, you value my willingness to spend my extremely limited free time studying to ace your half-baked engineering IQ test, for the honor of possibly working for you.
I once had a company cancel a scheduled interview when I informed them I had received an offer from another company, but was more interested in them and was wondering if I could step up the interview schedule. They told me unless I was willing to reject the existing offer and submit to their multi-week interview process we couldn't move forward. Esoteric, irrelevant algorithm questions with strict judgements are just a different version of that same arrogance.
If I'm put on the spot, under time pressure, to solve a problem I've never seen before and will likely never see again on the job, AND you reject me because my solution was slightly incorrect or naive, well it's obvious what the nature of the job is at that point. You're filtering for candidates that can and will devote dozens of hours to Cracking the Coding Interview and LeetCode. Sorry, I have a full-time engineering job and two young kids, and you clearly don't value my capabilities or experience or time, you value my willingness to spend my extremely limited free time studying to ace your half-baked engineering IQ test, for the honor of possibly working for you.
I once had a company cancel a scheduled interview when I informed them I had received an offer from another company, but was more interested in them and was wondering if I could step up the interview schedule. They told me unless I was willing to reject the existing offer and submit to their multi-week interview process we couldn't move forward. Esoteric, irrelevant algorithm questions with strict judgements are just a different version of that same arrogance.