He's not joking though. I've experienced 3 rounds of stupid tricky questions followed by a 4 hour "take home" project at a UK startup in Deep Learning before they were willing to even send flight tickets to London, and the feedback I've received was so comical that I almost wrote a blog post about it (I still might). Another robotic startup in SV grills with 6-hour stupid codility tests as a first phase (i.e. waste 6 hours just as a handshake). Not sure if they think time grows on trees or people have no other things to do just to pretend a day has 48 hours. I took those to see what the interviews are these days to stay fit, and I must say it's like a panopticon of Google-wannabes for uncompetitive salaries and useless equity with bad liquidation preference.
The problem is, for every person like you, there's a person like me that actually likes those types of challenges and wouldn't actually mind being thrown into that type of gauntlet. My years of experience be damned.
Sure, that might be the case. But for those funny needs I have a "crazy algorithm course" from a top 10 university, ACM ICPC and Kaggle or other paid competitions I can attend. I am not going to go through such an interview doing simple silly things I did dozen times before at FB/Goog/etc., when I know I can use that time to work on something more interesting, or just for relaxing after a hard work/enjoying accomplishments. I would advise companies hiring to at least once read CV and click through GitHub code, and then just focus on the only important question - would they like to work with me as a person or not? That would save everyone time and lead to better results.
One self-driving car start-up in SV wanted me to solve a long-standing research problem (Deep Learning) as their week-long take home test. Thanks, but when I do, you can license my tech, I will gladly make it available to you for $.
There's irony. Asking for GitHub is 10x worse than algorithmic questions. I just went through the interview process at big companies, with all the resources out there it's easy to get good at these types of questions.
During my professional time I write software to make money. During my free time I write software to make money. As an aging software engineer algorithmic questions just screen for how much time you're willing to put into an interviewing. GitHub screens for how much of a sucker you are.
Yeah, could be. Though if you provide a hiring company with a GitHub profile demonstrating your dominance, and then you are expected to waste another 6 hours on trivial algorithmic questions you probably did 100 times in the past 10 years, you'd probably just pass on that "opportunity". Those algorithmic questions were anyway originally meant to find the "best of the best", now they are used for entry-level positions. It's like asking an accomplished lawyer about what happened in 1758 and what was the effect on common law.
Imagine you get that very feature during some interview and the feedback you get is that you failed :DDD Reminds me when I created a few jokes as a kid that got nation-wide popularity; it was difficult to explain I made them from the scratch and the only thing those attempts gave me was to be marked as an "asshole" and "liar" :D