[...] Recall those brainteasers that Trilogy and other major tech companies used throughout the 1990s and into the next two decades. There has never been any evidence that they were useful in measuring who would be a good programmer. Yet it took until 2013 for Google to finally stop using them. "Brainteasers are a complete waste of time," Google's longtime former head of HR Laszlo Bock admitted to the New York Times in 2013. "They don't predict anything."

Well, maybe not anything useful, but they might have been good predictors of the sort of hyper self-confidence men are more prone to. [...] "We are going to ask you a question that has no relation to your job and one you've had no training in how to answer. Do you have the chutzpah to pretend that you can?"