I don't think they actually are "elitist douchebags". I think they needed a filter and executed, in that dimension, poorly. I'm sure they'll get better over time. They had to come up with a filter and didn't focus on how it would come across.

I would have partnered with a company that already had peoples' code and some experience using it to find who the good coders are. My recruiting experiences with coding-test sites were not very positive (as with dating, the sites were fine, it's the needle-haystack problem because there were few good ones and they got lots of attention) but Kaggle (which focuses on data science) might have greener pastures.