but i suspect that ita were exceptional. first, your puzzles were interesting - i imagine it's quite hard to think of interesting puzzles (how did you do it?). second, ita had a very good reputation so people were very motivated to work there. third, you may have been solving harder problems (and looking for more problem-oriented programmers) than many other companies.
i have done your puzzles for fun, but i would still be annoyed at having to do half-baked puzzles if i were suddenly out of a job and applying to a bunch of places.
I agree that the puzzles definitely have to be well-designed. There were a few of us -- myself included, for a while at least -- who created most of the puzzles.
We also never put a puzzle out to the world until a bunch of us had solved it. There was a long gestation period, and there's a "puzzles-discuss" mailing list for working out the kinks (and, in many cases, rejecting certain puzzles entirely). So, yes, you have to make a real commitment to do it well.
On the other hand, developing the puzzles was a lot easier than most of the coding on our real system, so it's all relative. It was actually really fun to do this stuff, and a nice change of pace. One of ITA's best developers (Justin Boyan) would take it upon himself to create the "perl postcard" solution for each problem. Another (Jim Rees) would always make an incredibly fast C++ version; it usually ended up being not only the fastest of ours, but faster than all the submitted solutions as well. I learned things just by reading his puzzle solutions. :)
I found the process rewarding beyond the hiring benefits, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. (Well, I hope so, at least.)
I'm jealous:) sounds like a lot of fun. When they came out, I used the ITA puzzles to shake the rust of my lisp skills and even considered sending some of the solutions in and applying, but that would have been a major career change.
In any case, kudos and thanks to you - those puzzles were a lot of fun, and I always wondered where they came from.
i have done your puzzles for fun, but i would still be annoyed at having to do half-baked puzzles if i were suddenly out of a job and applying to a bunch of places.
(ps. and thanks for them :o)