[philipkglass]

I got my first software job (at a startup) by doing well on an unpaid take-home challenge that I was able to spend a weekend on. A few years later I missed a job opportunity with another company by failing an optimization challenge question that had a much shorter time limit; I started formulating it as a graph search and by the time I realized that was a dead end approach my 3 hours were up. I definitely prefer having a weekend as opposed to a few hours. (Maybe I would have been a bad hire for the 3-hour-challenge position, if a typical work day really involved solving problems like that in a few hours, but I suspect it wasn't representative.)

When I was first looking for a software job I was a researcher who'd written a lot of his own tools but I didn't yet have an open source portfolio or commercial development experience. Solving a challenge was a great way to break the chicken-and-egg dilemma of needing experience to get hired and needing to be hired to get experience.

If I had to switch jobs again I'd also love to find employers screening with weekend challenges instead of live coding. Paying me to complete challenges would just be icing on the cake. I've done well at every company I've worked at, but asking me to write heapsort or whatever while you're peering over my shoulder and the clock is ticking is extremely stressful and unrepresentative.

I'm one of the people screening hires at my current job and I don't want to subject candidates to stressful live coding. But neither would I want to hire someone who can't write decent code and challenges look like a good way to prevent that. Surprisingly, even some people who include a github link in their CV are sharing code that's quite poor. (Like turning O(1) operations in an inner loop into O(N) because they picked the wrong collection type, in a language that offers perfectly suited collections in the standard library.) Maybe they think that nobody will actually read it, and having a github account at all will mark them as savvy?