> Personally, I've found it to be a good filter in terms of deciding where to interview at

Emphasizing this point for others. This is the best way to approach it IMO.

The company should work to impress you as much as you work to impress them.

Got a call from a recruiter that was looking for an oddly specific combination of skills. Me, so it’s Company X? He was flabbergasted. I gave 3 months notice. I was literally the only person in the world with that combination of skills. So I asked how much, went to bosses, I’ll stay on longer if you pay me that rate.

Good money for a few months.

I suppose that speaks positively of the recruiter's ability to find the right person for the job!

This. I got headhunted for a very very specific skill in my city. Asked them if it was company X? “How did you know??” “I wrote that rec”. I then proceeded to work directly with the recruiter to find a candidate and got an easy $1000 for about 4 hours of total work.

I'm curious about what the combination of skills was ?

Obscure mainframe tech and ruby, VB. About 15 years ago.

> The company should work to impress you as much as you work to impress them.

This becomes more true the further in your career you go. But for entry level positions it's really just a numbers game.

that's the balloon task, it measures willingness to take risks in contexts of ambiguity (the chance of it popping is not known). the button press task is probably used to normalize response time data, since some of the between person differences in average response time is due to (probably uninteresting) differences in motor-control of the neuromuscular system. were there any other tasks like ones that asked you to identify the color of the text regardless of what the word said (e.g. a blue word "red")?

The "willingness to take risks" is probably also "willingness to take crap" by an unemployed or underemployed person. A gainfully employed person may move on when the pseudoscientific video games come up during the screening interview. It is a risk to go work for such companies.

I think I would dispute the characterization of this as pseudo-scientific. The analogue balloon risk task is well validated, if in some ways poorly understood. That is, while standard economic risk models don't map onto it very well, it does correlate fairly substantially with real-world risky behaviors (so again, not economic risk where there is variance of outcomes, but more like the kind of risk taking where there are predictably bad outcomes, like trying heroin).

On the other hand, the use of these measures by big corps very well might be pseudo-scientific. I generally object to psychometrics being applied to prospective employees; it feels very dystopian to me. I also know that these measures require more subtle interpretation--and caution--than you're likely to get from anyone in HR, especially when we are talking about making inferences about individuals rather than groups of individuals.

Why you are being down-voted is beyond me. Your response is reasoned, clear, and open-minded, as well as informed. A citation might improve it, but as it stands, its a fine exemplar of the kinds of comments we should be promoting here on HN.