> still be met with these ridiculous and demeaning puzzles
That's to weed out people who did a 'bootcamp' or watched one youtube video and decided to quit flipping burgers and call themselves a 'senior engineer'.
But you do realize that they also weed out effective engineers who aren’t good at pointless puzzles, and that leetcode.com and dozens of other sources exist entirely to help people beat this system, right? They don’t measure useful skills. They’re a game that some people are good at beating and others aren’t, and whether that person is an effective engineer is largely unrelated to their skill at that game.
And it’s (often comically, always depressingly) necessary for this exact reason. In a recent interview my company conducted, the candidate clearly submitted code they had not written as if it were their own. One might be surprised at how well folks can talk, that cannot actually write relatively trivial code.