I think it's always been this way though in essence. I think it's actually better nowadays because more people are at least talking about the problem.

"How willing are you to jump through all the hoops that I had to jump through, plus a couple more, in order to get this job?"

People get rejected for reasons like that everyday. I have been part of several interviews where a co-interviewer would say something at least as stupid as that.

This is the real problem with giving feedback in our industry's interviews. The interviews are usually random circuses.

I can't believe nobody else pointed this out. And the 2-sum algorithm that one of the responses is clearly mentioning is something you would only know if you had seen the problem before, and it isn't something you would ever use unless you were writing some sort of obscure discrete optimization code.