"I've made a career fixing a ton of horribly shitty, inefficient code that's been produced exclusively by people who pass these interviews."
Well, the interviews are marginally effective at identifying new CS grads (who also are cheap and have few outside commitments - companies love this!) but not much else. You're exactly right to view it as an algorithms final exam or an algorithm puzzle contest, but Cracking the Coding Interview is an embarrassingly bad book, in spite of (?) its ostensible purpose of helping people study for algorithm puzzle interviews at Google, Facebook, etc..
Well, the interviews are marginally effective at identifying new CS grads (who also are cheap and have few outside commitments - companies love this!) but not much else. You're exactly right to view it as an algorithms final exam or an algorithm puzzle contest, but Cracking the Coding Interview is an embarrassingly bad book, in spite of (?) its ostensible purpose of helping people study for algorithm puzzle interviews at Google, Facebook, etc..