[Macross8299]

>a small take home project with a reasonable due date (say 5-8 days) that is representative of the kinds of work that is expected on the job. Then, a 1-2 hour code walk through and presentation. Candidate should expect to build, run, debug and describe the code and architecture, tools choices, show source control use etc.

The problem with this is that talented developers generally do not want to work for free on someone else's proprietary software and there is a very real risk of companies trying to abuse this practice to extract free labour from candidates the closer you get to "work that is representative of the kinds of work that is expected."

I do not want to spend hours of my life on unpaid labour for a company that may or may not hire me. Give me the 45-minute algorithmic challenge that puts me on the spot every time.

I also strongly suspect your 3 month probationary period would be an effective anti-signal as well, useful for attracting desperate candidates rather than the ones you really want. You can't reasonably expect a senior engineer to jump at leaving a secure position for a 50/50 shot they might be unemployed in 3 months because they're "not a good cultural fit."

[12298765]

To your second point, I'm a fairly young engineer with 1.5 years experience, and I'm not leaving my secure job for a shot at being a good 'cultural fit' for some other company.

Financial security is important, and I would put up with a lot of shit from my company before I'd consider taking a chance on another one like that.

Although I know some companies (my current one included) have a 3 month "probationary period" where they've only ever let 1 person go at the end out of approximately 150 since I've been there. It's just to make sure you're not a complete goon.

Problem is, it could be really hard to tell apart a company that has a "probationary period" like mine, or a real time that they judge you at the end.

[viraptor]

> work for free on someone else's proprietary software and there is a very real risk of companies trying to abuse this practice to extract free labour from candidates

This may happen in some places, but in practice I've never seen a task which actually could be applied anywhere. Most of the time these were toy projects, or simple exercises.

I think you'd easily notice if giving you the test was worth more to the company than all the recruitment time spent on taking to you. It's not free labour if you end up spending hours with each candidate, splitting up real work into "exercise chunks", integrating wildly different styles, validating results, etc.

[sj4nz]

I've seen this when the company switched the "exercise" as a no-wait-solve-this-one-instead which was fairly obvious it was a work-related task that was being farmed out to candidates.