Some of those interview questions have ridiculously short time constraints.
You need to be perfectly rested and well practiced in order to finish the exercises in time. Some of these tests seem to select for cheaters because only cheaters who either knew the questions ahead of time or who used AI to solve the problem could finish them in time.
Exactly. A lot of the problems asked of people are basically "do this multi week task that a team would probably work on at the actual company, except in an hour or two".
They also make you question whether you'd want to even work at a company with this sort of setup. Like, imagine a software engineering role where your boss wanted each project done within an hour, with no help from other developers or external sources, with a tech stack you're only told about the day the problem is given to you. Would anyone really consider that a good (or even tolerable) working environment?
My last take-home wanted a sudoku solving app coded from scratch in 30 minutes in an unusually restricted online sandbox IDE that would disqualify you if you defocused the window.
I have 28 years of verifiable professional software development experience on my resume.
I would just close the window 1 minute in because that's just ridiculous. Unless you've already done this before and play Sudoku regularly for fun, it would take you 10 minutes just to absorb the problem. Doesn't leave much time for coding. If you can't even minimize the window to read up on Sudoku, how the heck can you complete the task. The company will end up full of Sudoku enthusiasts who can barely code.
For my last online test, I wanted to close it within 5 minutes of reading the first question even though the problem was not particularly difficult, I just knew I couldn't solve it within 40 minutes because it was a problem that I had never seen before and was very disconnected from practical scenarios. I needed 20 minutes just to absorb the question fully. Also it was very late at night and I wasn't in an optimal state of mind.