Now that I think about it, it probably is useful for initial job screening. More like a psychological test to screen out those that get too riled up over stuff. Though that really has more to do with age. The first one I had took three hours. Years later, the recent one was 1 hour.
The one thing the intel community does want to screen out are rash decision makers. So it’s probably excellent measure of one’s ability to keep cool under pressure.
> More like a psychological test to screen out those that get too riled up over stuff.
If that's is the case, then a nasty side-effect is to weed out the people who as a general principle refuse to put up with abuse as a basic condition of their potential job. Maybe a small deal if you're only hiring James Bond-style spies, but a big deal if you're mainly hiring analysts.
Imagine in a FLOSS project that I force all pull-request makers to read through my recursive, non-deterministic set of makefiles and fix a bug there. How many high-quality pull requests will I accept under such a system vs. simply assessing pull requests on their merit?
Of course that's not a fair comparison. I apologize to polygraph operators for it. :)
The one thing the intel community does want to screen out are rash decision makers. So it’s probably excellent measure of one’s ability to keep cool under pressure.