>By "absolute no hire", I mean the kind where some of the interviewers tell me in the debriefing "I will quit if we hire this guy".
That's just a self-reinforcing selection bias - you hire people that are good at these kinds of problems/enjoy them - you filter out the rest by default and it becomes ingrained in the culture - it doesn't say anything about the suitability of the candidates you filtered out. If you said "we hired a guy who had a great resume but he couldn't do algorithmic problems, turned out to be a bad fit for the company" - that would still be a single data point but at least it would be relevant.
That's just a self-reinforcing selection bias - you hire people that are good at these kinds of problems/enjoy them - you filter out the rest by default and it becomes ingrained in the culture - it doesn't say anything about the suitability of the candidates you filtered out. If you said "we hired a guy who had a great resume but he couldn't do algorithmic problems, turned out to be a bad fit for the company" - that would still be a single data point but at least it would be relevant.