What seems objectionable to me, is that in order for Vlad to find people that are "cool" he's wasting everyone else's time.
This isn't exactly the same as if I give people a test on their ability. It's different. In here you pass if you did something that scores well in a metric that you're not told about. It's not very different than if I gave you a take home assignment which is just literally "code something - you have to be good at ambiguity!" Joking, you just have to guess the thing I had in mind. It's very inconsiderate to people, and doesn't tell me anything good about this Vlad person.
I think it's very reasonable to expect that there should be better communication here about this actually being a combination culture-fit-and-coding assessment. But I don't actually think it's fair to say that nobody is told about the metric. It's pretty clear to me. I think a lot of other people here also understood it (which makes sense, because they're all Hacker News brained). I agree that this sucks if you don't "get" it but I'm not entirely sure if there is a good way to convey this. Maybe they shouldn't be looking for this at all but that's a separate discussion.
This isn't exactly the same as if I give people a test on their ability. It's different. In here you pass if you did something that scores well in a metric that you're not told about. It's not very different than if I gave you a take home assignment which is just literally "code something - you have to be good at ambiguity!" Joking, you just have to guess the thing I had in mind. It's very inconsiderate to people, and doesn't tell me anything good about this Vlad person.