[fizx]

A take-home coding challenge will bias your pool of applicants towards relatively junior overachievers who are barely skilled enough to complete your challenge.

More senior and skilled people will decline to participate, because they know they can get a better return using the time otherwise spent on the coding challenge to network for more and easier opportunities.

So now you've done a great job of raising the floor of your interviews for little direct cost, but you've also lowered the ceiling.

[qudat]

> A take-home coding challenge will bias your pool of applicants towards relatively junior overachievers who are barely skilled enough to complete your challenge.

I completely disagree with this assessment and I'll even reverse it: turning down a job opportunity simply because they requested a take-home challenge could shut you out of good opportunities.

Furthermore, no matter the interview style, there's going to be a bias.

Some people are great at white boarding, so they naturally want to take those as well as conduct them. Some interviews are all about personality fit, great, everyone will work together well.

I'm a senior engineer and would gladly accept a take-home challenge.

Ultimately as an interviewee I'd like to spend the least amount of time demonstrating the most amount of my abilities while at the same time getting a firm grasp of the company and how they conduct themselves. I firmly believe that take-home coding challenges could play a part in that balancing act between measuring competency and not wasting my time.

[on_and_off]

I got my last 2 jobs after take home challenges (and I am a senior engineer).

The last take home was a 6 hours exercise. I did not really see it at an huge opportunity cost.

I would have trained 10 times that for a whiteboard entirely unrelated to my day to day job.

[watwut]

6 hours seems too much to me. I would put maximum I am willing to spend at 4 hours.

[on_and_off]

ah, funnily enough we have recently reduced the scope of the exercise and asked only for 4 hours. At the same time we are now looking for less senior engineers.

We are also looking at ways we can make this exercise easier for everybody by providing a template with some of the basic boilerplate already written for the applicant.

It is difficult to find a happy medium between a trivial exercise and something you can work on for hundred of hours but I think we have something fair.

I find it interesting that you put your limit at 4 hours. It is not that much smaller than 6. Anecdotally 6 hours is the maximum timing .. if an aplicant said they only had 4 hours that day but delivered something solid in that time frame I would vote for them.

[watwut]

> I find it interesting that you put your limit at 4 hours. It is not that much smaller than 6.

4 hours means that I can do it within half a day on weekend and then spend the rest of the day with something else - going somewhere. At minimum, I can send kids outside with someone and be 4 hours alone at home to focus. Or I can do it 2 hours one evening and 2 hours another one - two days.

6 hours means that I spent most day with it. Expecting them to be outside 6 hours in row is a lot and so is blocking one room for that long. It would also mean 3 evenings not just 2.

> At the same time we are now looking for less senior engineers.

That is cool. (Really, all too many companies like to pretend that juniors don't exists or cant learn or just should magically become seniors instantly. Meanwhile, junior can the right person for the job.)

[on_and_off]

>4 hours means that I can do it within half a day on weekend and then spend the rest of the day with something else - going somewhere. At minimum, I can send kids outside with someone and be 4 hours alone at home to focus. Or I can do it 2 hours one evening and 2 hours another one - two days.

Makes sense, thanks for answering. Yeah for 6 hours you probably need to leave work a little bit early or work until late at night (if you want to fit it in your work week).

The way we setup the take home, you can't work on it for several evenings in a row : we have a 24h timer starting when you first see what you have to do. So you can do it over a full day if you want (like 2 hours in the morning and 2 more in the evening) but you can't work on it 60 hours over a week (that's the main potential issue I can see with take homes .. it encourages you to spend a lot of time in order to show off)

>Really, all too many companies like to pretend that juniors don't exists or cant learn .

Yeah, in all fairness a junior is a lot of work. You basically make the bet to lose 20% (made up number) of productivity for a year in order to mentor somebody in the hope that this person will stay for a while and grow.

However, we already spend so much time interviewing people that honestly I can't be convinced that only hiring 'best in the world' engineers is such a great idea.

[matchbok]

I'd bet few people will turn down an opportunity because of a couple hours spent working on a project. If they got this far in the interview process they should already know if it's a place where they wanna work. This is needless elitism. We hire tons of senior devs and small programming challenges are miles better then white-boarding.

[Clubber]

>More senior and skilled people will decline to participate, because they know they can get a better return using the time otherwise spent on the coding challenge to network for more and easier opportunities.

Absolutely this. No top would put up with this unless the company is paying an ungodly sum of money.

[Consultant32452]

I agree with you, maybe it's because I spent so much time consulting. My small project rate is $125/hr. And I've usually got someone lined up who is willing to pay me for whatever free time I can offer. The potential return on your free coding puzzle game would have to be pretty insane to get me to give up real guaranteed money.

A better option might be to just hire me as a consultant for some real ticket of yours and let me work it in off hours. Then we both win.

[Clubber]

I haven't gone through the traditional interview process since 1999, and that's just because I was only a few years in and wanted more money. Every job I've ever gotten since then has been from someone I've worked with before. They tell their boss, they take me out to lunch and it's a done deal.