We use such things too, it's exactly to test if someone is at least in general able to code. Surprisingly often there seem to be candidates which look good on paper and talk like that but are unable to perform such toy coding tasks.
Even if you usually would use a library function, finding the max of a list or similar problems are still sufficiently simple tasks which every programmer should be able to perform. It's straightforward and not about remembering some complicated algorithm from some CS class years ago nobody ever implements themselves.
Even if you usually would use a library function, finding the max of a list or similar problems are still sufficiently simple tasks which every programmer should be able to perform. It's straightforward and not about remembering some complicated algorithm from some CS class years ago nobody ever implements themselves.