[thaumasiotes]

> they generally have an actual problem to solve, rather than "solve N-Queens." Some companies (Dropbox comes to mind) have coding tests, but they're async, and they also aren't convoluted Leetcode problems.

I applied to Dropbox some years ago, and the coding test was an NP-hard problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rectangle_packing

[sgarland]

Oh my. Mine was SRE-specific to be fair, and was the kind of thing I'd do for fun to answer "what if..." It was timeboxed to two hours, and IIRC I had a working solution in about half that, then spent the rest iterating and improving.