[didibus]

I find as both an interviewer and an interviewee that I prefer whiteboarding.

But, it depends who you need to hire. If you need someone to just do the job. A coding challenge is fine. If you want someone who's above the rest in their CS knowledge, and problem solving skills, than a whiteboard interview is best.

Just my opinion. I have no data for this.

A whiteboard interview is pretty much a coding challenge where I can observe the candidate's methodology and their general approach to tackling problems. That's super valuable information.

From being a candidate myself, I've found that having someone watch me and being in a room with the stress and all motivates me to show my best. Whereas coding challenges I really lack the motivation and I end up rushing them, doing them last minute, and really not showing my best.

Ultimately, I think they both aren't ideal, but we don't have anything better short of an internship (and even those don't always pan out, since interns are treated differently and provided more hand holding).

In the end, it's just hard to reduce work that in practice spans multiple weeks per project, and involve all kinds of side process, to something you can test for in under a day.

[shantly]

> From being a candidate myself, I've found that having someone watch me and being in a room with the stress and all motivates me to show my best. Whereas coding challenges I really lack the motivation and I end up rushing them, doing them last minute, and really not showing my best.

OTOH, whiteboards or live-coding under interview conditions is a great way to watch me do worse work than I did when I was less than a year out from writing my first hello world. And yeah, I'm cool & collected under normal shit's-broken pressure, or client's-pissed-off pressure, on the actual job, which is totally different.

[gremlinsinc]

Same, I can't code while being watched, but I can do a take home assessment. My favorites have been real world stuff like ... build x by creating your own MVC w/ x, y, and z as a base... like x router, y templating engine, etc...

[shantly]

Someone on here posted something about letting candidates pick an open issue on an open-source project and prep a PR for it, to go over. Easily my favorite version of a take-home assignment I've ever heard of—it's not throwaway junk or contrived bullshit, and I get to claim the PR if it gets accepted, whether or not you hire me, so while it's not paid it's also not a complete waste of my time if the job doesn't work out—but it's not repeatable the same way for every candidate (which is kind of the point? I mean selecting the issue to tackle is part of the assessment, which, as long as there's a little guidance about the sort of thing that's considered good-enough so you're not entirely in the dark re: expectations, seems ideal) so a certain kind of hiring manager or interviewer will think it's necessarily crap.

[gremlinsinc]

That's genius. Almost sounds like something that could be it's own Startup/SaaS. A marketplace of code 'assignments' that OSS projects need done, employer can 'tag' assignments that they approve of, then you submit your work to the employer/oss project simultaneously so both can do a code review of it, if you lose the job but it gets accepted by the OSS then at least there's that. -- The employer would be the only part paying $$ for the platform, but it could be tax deductible as a 'donation' to OSS perhaps.