If the system is so poorly evaluating people that they have to train an irrelevant set of skills to succeed in it, what does that say about the system?

I am a big fan of the take-home problem. For example, Symantec once asked applicants to design a simple virus detector with wildcards (similar to grep) and then they gave interview spots to people with the best performance. During the actual interview, however, there wasn't much whiteboard coding only designing or "how would you do X" sort of questions.

There's a small list of companies I'd do a, "Take home test," for. In my experience, most companies that ask for it are looking for free labor.

I've never done a take home test that produced anything that could have been vaguely useful for the interviewing company. Usually the problems are pretty artificial.

They absolutely should be artificial problems. If they're not carefully designed to test what the hiring company cares about, it's a bad test

Well if they are good enough for you to put their code into your program then shouldn't they be good enough to be offered a job? Seems like it works exactly as intended in terms of trying to find someone who can do the job

I've had multiple take home tests result in changes to the products that company offers. I've never received a job offer from those companies. Maybe your experience differs, but I've had a sour taste left by such practice.

I wouldn't say coding algorithms is "irrelevant". It's sort of like saying the SAT is irrelevant. It's a general aptitude test. It's not about the "relevancy" of trigonometry to your day to day work.

You could argue it's stupid and colleges should only look at personal essays and GPAs and extracurriculars. But then there's problems with that too (lack of standardization for one).

You could argue that high schools shouldn't teach trig or calc because they're largely irrelevant to most tasks in most fields and "what does that say about the system". But actually they do come into play once and awhile and lay a conceptual foundation, so they're still sort of useful to learn. And thus they form a good common foundation to test aptitude inside an hour or so, or at least no one's thought of a better one.

I knew when the interviewer pulled out his phone to snap a picture of only that part of the whiteboard that I didn’t get the job lol