[soham]

" This is certainly a skill that takes time to develop, and if you're concerned with hiring the best, don't you think this is a decent heuristic to throw in with a bunch of others?"

It's an excellent heuristic. It doesn't separate good vs bad programmers; it identifies programmers who love solving problems, and see their careers as problem solvers instead of as limited-view coders who are assigned a javascript task.

Like you said, it also takes time to develop this. So it also identifies programmers who have taken the time to hone that kind of problem-solving intuition, which is far more difficult to develop, than throwing up a webpage with bootstrap.

I run a successful coding interview prep bootcamp for a living. Among other things, we also go thru several Data Structures and Algorithms. Primary objective is to practice intuition on some of these problems. Those who work hard at it, invariably develop irreversible intuition to this stuff.

[http://interviewkickstart.com]