> a friend of mine once got a Google Code Jam World Finals question in a phone interview with Google (...) I doubt there were more than a few hundred people in the world who would've gotten the right answer to the question in a phone screen and almost all of them probably would've realized that it was an absurd phone screen question

Link to the question: https://code.google.com/codejam/contest/2437491/dashboard#s=...

The gist of it is: You are given 4*N points on a 2D plane. Can you draw two perpendicular lines to separate them into N points per quadrant?

I think Dan's missing context is that google code jam questions always have a small and large dataset. In this case, small is N=10 which makes a lot of bruteforce solutions possible and not much different from any other bruteforce puzzles common in interviews. Being a geometry question is the more unfair part if this is a generalist role (but not unfair if your role involves graphics, computer vision, self driving car mapping, etc).

Expecting a solution for the large (N=2500) is ridiculous of course. See analysis: https://code.google.com/codejam/contest/2437491/dashboard#s=...