> Anyone who's studied information theory would destroy that puzzle though. In the same way that someone with a physics degree would perform way above average on a "count the stars" question. Or someone whose dissertation was on computational biology would excel at a string-matching algorithm question.
And...all of this is information the interview panel typically has available when evaluating candidates, as well as the result of any exercises done as part of the interview.
> It is an example of the interviewer (or company/process) mistaking a specific problem as representative of all problems. Presumably they're looking for someone with "general problem solving skills", rather than "knowledge of astrophysics".
If the process uses just one and not a set of exercises spread across problem domains, and gives it a fixed weight in the evaluation process and considers it independently of the candidates resume, the rest of the interview, etc., treating each component orthogonally rather than evaluating them together holistically, that might be true.
But that's not a problem with the puzzle as a tool, that's a problem with how the tool is used.