Harder programming questions do a worse job of predicting outcomes
Aside from all the things mentioned in the article, this also seems like a fairly predictable application of Goodhart&#x27;s Law: &quot;Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.&quot;<p>Once upon a time, skill at doing these sorts of problems might have correlated (imperfectly) with general aptitude as a programmer or software engineer. But the very act of trying to leverage that correlation for hiring purposes probably also made it go away. Now you&#x27;ve got a whole lot of people practicing hard on these sorts of problems, spending huge chunks of their free time grinding away on Project Euler and Advent of Code and HackerRank. That muddies the quality of this stuff as a proxy for what it was originally trying to detect: natural aptitude. I&#x27;m guessing having time to level grind like that also correlates inversely with other traits that are desirable in a programmer.