Endgame interview questions

Typical tech interview in Silicon Valley, take home exercises, tech phone screen and onsite. Your time is wasted with all this and then are told the position is "on hold" . Why have someone go through the process if the position is "on hold". Don't waste your time applying. They are not serious. Probably just gathering salary requirement.

I had an initial phone screening where I was told about company culture and answered some questions about my experience. This was followed up with a technical interview a couple days later. It was set up as a video interview, which I wasn't aware of. I also didn't know there would be a coding challenge. The questions/conversation part went fine. The coding challenge didn't go as well. I was asked to write a function implementing a concept I wasn't familiar with. This part of the interview was maybe 30 minutes long, which included explaining the concept, me asking questions to try to understand what it was supposed to do/how it would work, and the actual implementation. I didn't get to a solution within the half hour. Afterward, I worked a couple extra minutes trying to figure out out before returning to work. I ended up looking up the solution and realized I wasn't really understanding what was being asked. I don't really feel generating the extra pressure of having candidates do a surprise monitored coding challenge with little time to implement is going to bring out the best in them to provide a fair assessment of their problem solving skills.