You're not weird. Puzzles can definitely be fun, but, in my experience, it doesn't mean you're a lousy programmer if you can't solve one/some.

Everyone likes to use Google as the example of the elite programming company. I've read the books about them, used the products, followed their progress over the years. So, sure, a part of their big success is hiring the 'smartest' college grads.

However, I've also worked with Ph.D.'s and even interviewed them for positions lower than ones I've held (I have not yet finished college - some day...). And I can tell you that book smarts != execution smarts.

I feel the same way about puzzles. I have never used puzzles or asked 'small' one off programming questions. Instead I've always been interested more in grep'ing the concepts and if the personality is the proper fit. In my mind, anyone can open up a book and read about specifics about O(log n). But how does a person persist at solving a problem and how do they (can they?) change direction if their solution sucks?

I feel like I value creativity over anything and they can creatively solve a puzzle, cool. But if they can creatively solve a task on the system I'm building and are a great fit to the team, then better.

Same here. My impression is that the puzzle lovers turn out to be the algorithm geeks. You need a bunch of those, but I can't see how a room for of complexity analysis experts necessarily creates well-structured software.

I'm an API design geek. I've never seen a cool puzzle about API design, or something remotely related.

i'm pretty sure one of quora's questions is/was designing an api for something in python (probably time, given how bad the current api is).

also, replying more to the other post above - you can get insights from puzzles. a lot depends on the puzzle (which is why ita is getting praise here). for example, the ita puzzle i remember taught me a lot about handling data in large numbers of dimensions (in particular, it made me think about the "curse of dimensionality" which was something i was aware of before, but hadn't considered in detail; it also led me to understanding some tools for dealing with it - locality sensitive hashing being the most interesting at the time).

Most puzzles are not very interesting. :) But some are surprisingly rich, and those are the good ones to put in front of candidates in my opinion. E.g., I worked on one puzzle before I left ITA that involved laying out train track pieces to create a complete circuit within a rectangular region. (I don't believe this one has ever been used, but I could be wrong about that.) It was pretty interesting to solve this heuristically, but it turned out to involve something much deeper: the theory of so-called "lattice animals" -- an active area of research I knew nothing about.

Lattice animals include polyominoes, which are probably familiar to most HN readers, but subsume other graph-related objects as well. I didn't know much about these, and ended up reading a bunch of cool papers on them as part of working on the puzzle. So at least for me, good puzzles have catalyzed some learning.

I don't think that's too weird. I am never very interested in solving puzzles. Myst was a major turnoff, for instance. The Project Euler problems are usually "meh".

My mathematical preference is continuous math; my preference for using mathematics is to apply them into real problems.

I'm not saying that all puzzles are pointless, but I think most interview puzzles are kind of an empty exercise that only a certain type of person likes, and that only people who know the trick will get.