I recently interviewed with an SF consulting company (a sort of network/placement firm), which purports to offer only the most senior devs to the hottest companies. The process includes a timed puzzle-solving test.

Ironically, fresh CS grads are more likely to do better on such a test because senior devs have filled their minds with ways of solving real problems and building complex living systems that actual humans use. They know that the once or twice a year they need to solve such a problem, they will likely find it well-solved in a library or site like this one. If not, they know that the boss will not be holding a stop watch over them -- she measures productivity in person-months, not person-minutes.

Even more ironically, this particular test also rewards premature optimization by stress testing your solutions for micro-optimization.

Yup. I just did an interview that was hours of this at one of the larger California companies.

The only way to ace is to memorize the implementations otherwise there was no way to get it done on a whiteboard in 20 minutes.

There were a lot of added weird constraints as well like implementing sorts with singly linked lists in constant space (not lg(n)) preventing the use of recursion or a stack in order to make a simple implementation.

I would say that the entire interview was basically a test of your knowledge of the companies published information as well as the algorithms linked to in the prep email sent by the recruiter.

Pretty much zero interest in the knowledge and skills you do have. Only one interviewer out of six asked questions about the resume and even then only briefly.

i had the same experience with linkedin, facebook and google

I guess it's hard to change, even after it becomes clear the old way doesn't work.

http://qz.com/96206/google-admits-those-infamous-brainteaser...

Yup! This is still the case. If you want to pass the interview you have to memorize a bunch of common algorithms and data structure implementation.