But yes, that kind of puzzles can be fun sometimes! (Back when I had no family and free time for such things).
But worst part is that the interview experience is entirely different from doing puzzles for fun at home. In an interview you need to present a carefully choreographed act where you:
- pretend to be quickly discovering the solution out of the blue (even though the original algorithm took some PhD multiple years to figure out)
- never solving any part too quickly, or they'll fail you for having seen it before (of course you've seen it before if you've done the requisite months of practice)
- never solving any part too slowly, or you'll be labeled "yet another who can't even write an if statement" (comment seen often on HN)
- maintain a running commentary to "show how you think", make it credible
- while doing all this, be writing syntax perfect code on a whiteboard
- while the interviewer makes derogatory comments about how much help you appear to need, alternates between browsing social media on their phone