[cjCamel]

I find the move to take home tests extremely unfair. Anyone with dependents will typically need to block out most of a day of a weekend, or risk doing it in intervals through their week.

Got a decent CV? Good luck trying to juggle applying for more than 2 interesting opportunities at once.

We mostly hire full stack web devs. IMO It's impossible to really test the abilities of each candidate across the changing landscape of front end, back end, DB & devops tech within an interview process that doesn't use a vast amount of time for everyone.

Instead, we don't whiteboard or code at all in our process at the moment, and try and get it all done in a face to face hour or two by:

* Taking their experience at face value. Examples: If they have been coding for a couple of years, don't waste everyone's time with fizzbuzz. Assume they will be able to adapt to our source control system, if they have been using a different one.

* Insisting on real world examples when asking competency questions.

* Asking generic questions about code, such as "What is clean code?", "what should you take into account for password security for a web app?", and looking for their ability to communicate as much as their actual answer.

* Looking for areas of strength and weakness to compare across candidates, rather than trying to catch them out.

* Scoring highly for enthusiasm, flexibility and a willingness to learn over pure technical knowledge.

I appreciate this approach wouldn't work for all organisations but we've done really well out of it.

[drakenot]

I’m never dropping the Fizzbuzz style problem. It has absolutely blown me away the number of people who market themselves as senior people who can’t perform the most simple or basic coding tasks.

No fancy algorithms. No obscure data structures. Just simple loops and conditionals in any language.

It has been the most effective (and most depressing tool) I’ve seen in eliminating the myriad of fakers and unqualified people.

[mrfusion]

I think it’s more that people get really nervous in interviews. And they’re trying to use the social part of their brain and the coding part at the same time. It’s not normal.

[vonmoltke]

In the dozens of interviews I have conducted so far, I have run into exactly one person who fit this description.

[johnnyfaehell]

During my last job hunt, I literally told one company I wouldn't do their take-home test. They literally told me it takes days to do, which if you're going to do greenfield code is extremely easy to do. They came back to asking people questions "People memorise that", "people can learn that", etc which is super weird since a take-home test I can literally have a dude from China do and they would be none the wiser.

But the main thing for me was the arrogance of the company/CTO, was pretty much a no-name e-commerce company that was expecting someone to do days worth of work for a job. I've not even heard the like FANG or anyone expecting that during their interview and they are actually places some people really want to work at. Which made me worry about the quality of developers they had if they all had such trouble in the job market that they had to spend days on a tech test to find a job.

Weird thing was, I said I was willing to be tech tested in their office over a period of hours I just wasn't willing to do a take-home tech test, apparently that was too hard for them to figure out and they just did the good ole no contact rejection.

[mrfusion]

Ironically if you can get a dude from China to do your take home test and do it well, companies should be jumping over each other to hire you.

It would show great management skills and you could save them a ton of money outsourcing.