I realize that the study was specifically talking about brainteasers, but I wonder if irrelevant algorithm questions have a similar motivation? I was once asked at an interview at a FAANG company to come up with an algo for finding the longest palindromic subsequence (!). At another I was asked to get all partitions of an integer (https://www.whitman.edu/mathematics/cgt_online/book/section0...).
I'm pretty certain I'd never be working on problems of that nature as part of the role.
I'm pretty certain I'd never be working on problems of that nature as part of the role.