[hobs]

And the person who could potentially write the "most perfect" code with all of the conditions applied is often not within that company's price range.

I did interviews at a company for about 2 years and there was constant pressure from management to do trivial crap like that, it finally came to a head and I invited management and one of the "rockstars" to do a mock interview.

When it was evident that the person they thought of as a "rockstar" could not solve these tests(without prior knowledge of the problems), they immediately discounted them as a worthless and stopped bugging me (about that, of course not about everything else).