[smallnamespace]

Fully agree with that, brain teasers should definitely not be the dominant component of any interview process.

That said, I've run into interviewees who have simply refused to fully engage with a brain teaser -- like they just shut down and gave up, even after I provided hints. For me, that seems to be a signal that they're not likely to deal well with unexpected puzzles that appear in the normal course of engineering work.

[yodon]

It may also be they dislike the artificiality of the question style, particularly if they look like “find the twist hidden deep in the description because this isn’t a normal real world problem” sort of questions.