They want to know if you have studied the fundamentals, so you at least have a chance of understanding whatever you are going to be copy-pasting from Stack Overflow.
I've gone the route of avoiding typical interviews altogether by leaning into my network for opportunities.
There are plenty of places where I think I'd like to work, where I'd be very motivated, and where I'd make an impact to the organization, but I'll never bother because their interview style is bad.
> have a chance of understanding whatever you are going to be copy-pasting from Stack Overflow.
And, frankly, I avoid all of this because what you've said here is exactly the sort of place where I don't want to work.
While their process might be arbitrary, it tries to ensure that entrants can comfortably think about and select appropriate data structures and algorithms for problems, on demand.
In most cases, prepping for this feels like rote memorization, but through that process you start to build an intuition that helps you be more efficient at pattern matching and isolating the constraints/bottlenecks. And you've proven that you can learn and apply the algos. It's not the most fun of interview styles, but it does work for them.
So what’s the 6 week interview for? To recognise talent? Sure I can see that in a junior a bit (but I doubt you find out more in the all those interviews than a 15 minute chat, at least that’s my experience; you will actually need to hire and try them on a project in the team to know their feel for it all) but in a senior that’s the portfolio again.
To me it feels that we are starting in a position where the interviewer assumes I lied about everything I sent in and this all is to prove myself (again and again). I am not in kindergarten; I have decades of experience in huge project; good luck finding a stooge who likes abusive relations.
It does feel like the balance of power in these interviews is way out of whack, but that's what you get when there's way more applicants than open roles. If you're a developer with a good reputation, sometimes you can skip most of the red tape [1]. That bar is extremely high, though.
