Exactly - and not just whether they've played with Legos, but whether you've played with (or at least been curious about) the new modern (and incredibly expensive) robotic kind (or robot kits generally).
Which inevitably leads to outcomes like:
"Oh I see you're from Kazakhstan, and got top grades at one of the top schools there. And your GitHub account just blew our team away, the minute we saw it. And we can tell, from talking to you for 5 minutes, that you obviously know FP and SQL/NoSQL and database internals and caching and consensus protocols inside and out."
"But wait -- what's that look in your face when we ask you about solving this little Lego problem? Do you not like puzzles? Or wait - you mean you've never heard of Legos, for chrissake? We'll, what can I say. Sorry to break this to you, but we're looking for engineers here, not mere 'coders'. And how do you tell if someone has the soul of an engineer? It's because they dig shit like Legos and robot kits and stuff. They totally geek out and go to town on problems like this, in fact!"
"But then again, that kind of person obviously isn't you. Feel free to apply again in 6 months (after you've passed another 3-hour HackerRank test and our mandatory Skype session on culture fit, of course)."
Which inevitably leads to outcomes like:
"Oh I see you're from Kazakhstan, and got top grades at one of the top schools there. And your GitHub account just blew our team away, the minute we saw it. And we can tell, from talking to you for 5 minutes, that you obviously know FP and SQL/NoSQL and database internals and caching and consensus protocols inside and out."
"But wait -- what's that look in your face when we ask you about solving this little Lego problem? Do you not like puzzles? Or wait - you mean you've never heard of Legos, for chrissake? We'll, what can I say. Sorry to break this to you, but we're looking for engineers here, not mere 'coders'. And how do you tell if someone has the soul of an engineer? It's because they dig shit like Legos and robot kits and stuff. They totally geek out and go to town on problems like this, in fact!"
"But then again, that kind of person obviously isn't you. Feel free to apply again in 6 months (after you've passed another 3-hour HackerRank test and our mandatory Skype session on culture fit, of course)."