No, or you're strawmanning the type of interview that is being suggested here. No, the challenge is about solving the problem; it doesn't take "creativity" to find the maximum in a list of integers, and the problems a SWE is going to encounter in the real world far dwarf such a question in terms of difficulty or "creativity" required to solve.

Some of the rougher AoC problems are harder, yes a bit more so. But a.) I qualified that that's not in context here in the original comment and b.) even there, it often isn't creativity that's required, it is knowing your basic principles, e.g., what data structures exist and when to apply them. But HN has an anathema when it comes to this sort of stuff; heaven forbid that SWE requires skills.

> I think that pressure can be good for creativity but it can also be it's death. However, motivation is important for creativity. Competing online with other like minded people is a good motivation whereas a job is something you need literally in order to survive. It's not really comparable imo.

This is mostly non sequitur. There's no eliminating stress completely from an interview, but depending on what tech I have handy, allowing the candidate a full REPL, access to reference material, coding in an IDE and language of their choice are all there to reduce stress and let the interview focus on what hopefully the candidate is good at.

I'm not attempting to compare competing online with an interview: you're not competing online in one of my interviews. The sort of problems, however, as an example of what might be asked in a coding question is the scope of what is being compared here. The point is: a. they're not the infamous sewer lid question b. they don't require "one clever insight" to solve and c. they in many ways mirror real-world issues. (E.g., parsing an input, taking an english description and turning it into relatively simple code.)