globba22

Like a few other commenters have mentioned, I had a great time trying to work through these problems having seen them in ads on the Red Line in the mid to late 2000s.

For me, these puzzles were what got me to change careers; at that point I was in a non-technical job and didn't have any CS training. Still, I saw these puzzles and was hooked. Figuring out how to even set up a basic coding environment was part of the puzzle for me.

I spent a few weeks on "Strawberry Fields", eventually getting to a brute force solution that passed all the tests. I was about to send it in, and happened to meet one of the ITA folks at a social event. After a few minutes of talking to this gentleman, I realized he was in a completely different intellectual class from me, and that I had to do a lot better than hacking together a solution to a single optimization problem if I really wanted to work in this industry.

I persisted. I kept solving whatever coding problems I could find and rung by rung, climbed my way into some interesting and challenging software and data roles. I bombed plenty of whiteboard interviews along the way.

It sounds funny to write down, but it is not an understatement to say that those ads on the T changed my life!

the post office used humans for many years to train OCR models, e.g. zip code readers.

I visited a postal routing facility once in the 90s and saw a long row of metal stationed by about 20 people, 10 to each side. Envelopes passed through on a sort of pneumatic tube-like conveyor, paused in front of a human operator who read a single digit of a zip code, keyed it in and sent the envelope to be read by the next person.

I've had a similar experience there

I know a lot of great devs who think very highly of PP, but as for me, it doesn't work well at all.

I just haven't had a great experience with it, though I remain open to trying it again.

It depends on the type of candidate you hope to attract.

If someone is applying for a lot of positions at once, an up front homework problem can be seen as unreasonable before even a basic semblance of role compatibility is established.

Why not offer it as a HW problem after a resume and phone screen?

When you refer to "PM" are referring to Project or Product Manager?

Wise thinkers throughout history have been saying it too :)