I wonder if such a scheme would fly in other disciplines of Engineering? Would they hire a person at a Thermal power station, who can dazzle people with fancy Laplace transforms on a white-board?

I recently interviewed for a position at a small Amsterdam based company. They simply asked me to work with them and refactor a part of their code base. It was really interesting and frankly, we all had lots of fun during the 3-4 hour process.

Coming from the USA, it was eye opening to see the ingenuity of this simple way to determine candidates ability. It's such a shame that Stack ranking like HackerRank are being favoured instead of on-job evaluation.