That trend was always comical to me. I’ve never been one to memorize documentation, specific function call orders, etc, and I remember miserably failing a coding test for Comcast. The test? Write a full contact management application on an isolated computer, no IDE, using notepad and no installed runtime.

You’re spot on with the uselessness of modern algorithmic questions. We live in a world of high level languages; in 20+ years, I’ve never implemented a single one of those coding problems in an actual codebase. I would prefer to hire an intelligent, sociable person with core skills and who has room to learn and grow, rather than someone who can ace silly algorithms but can’t work with a team or complex codebase.

Heck, the person you refer to having hired, and presumably fired, may not have even used these tools. The trend these days is to learn to the coding tests from sites we all know about, not the ideas or concepts needed to work in a real team on a real application. They spend all their time writing algorithms, but often never actually touch a database/write a real complex application. The bootcamp explosion was a self-escalating problem for algorithm-based test questions.