Sadly, each time I want to change job, I have to go through those questions again. No any company (or interviewer) would admit that they decide whether or not to extend an offer to you solely based on how well you solve those programming puzzles. But reality is, your "performance" during the interview session is oftentimes more important than your experience (e.g., your side projects. Even you can demo your projects in front of interviewers, they just don't care -- because they themselves joined the company in the same way -- solving programming puzzles)
I blame it on primate science. Some scientists got some chimps, did some tests, and figured running tests and puzzles on the chimps to gauge their performance must map to humans as well due to a loosely correlated metric, such as genetic distance.
