[ravenstine]

Ghosting after a take home test really bites. Either provide feedback or give an expectation on how long it will take to make a decision. Don't make me do free work and leave me hanging.

But yeah, it does happen. I used to advocate for take home assignments, but now I really don't know what the answer is for directly assessing skill. Leetcode sucks, but take home assignments have their own problems. Maybe the problem with both approaches is that there really is no sort of standardization of practices or measurement of success that I'm aware of.

[WorldMaker]

Lawyers take a Bar exam until they pass it and then never have to take it again. They just have to stay up-to-date/active with the associated Bar (so many hours of training a year; etc).

Real Engineers take a Fundamentals of Engineering exam followed by the Professional Engineering exam in their discipline/focus. Then Engineers have to stay with the associated Professional Society (so many hours of training a year; paying dues; etc).

In the Software industry we love using the title "Engineer", but we don't seem to want to put the work in to make it an actual engineering profession. There is a software PE exam and professional society in existence already (ACM) built and willing to be the professional society for software engineering. I would take the Software PE exam and pay my ACM member dues in a heartbeat if that meant never needing to do another leetcode or take home assignment or whiteboard exercise in an interview cycle. We have the tools to solve this, just not the will to solve it, it seems.

[vonmoltke]

> Then Engineers have to stay with the associated Professional Society (so many hours of training a year; paying dues; etc).

Speaking for the US, they do not. Joining a professional society is not a condition of licensure, nor is licensure required to join (I have been a member if IEEE since I joined in undergrad in 2001 and never even took the FE).

Continuing education requirements are set by the state you are licensed in. Texas (where I would have been if I had pursued licensure) requires a mere 15 Professional Development Hours per year, of which five may be self-directed. That is far, far below what our industry expects.

Also, I worked for four years as an electrical engineer without even being an EIT. Not all "real Engineers" require licenses.

> There is a software PE exam

Not anymore. Every state that once offered it has dropped it, and NCEES no longer maintains such a test.

> if that meant never needing to do another leetcode or take home assignment or whiteboard exercise in an interview cycle

Considering how low the requirements for maintaining a PE are after passing the initial exams, I don't think that has a snowball's chance in Hell of flying in this industry.

[ravenstine]

I would pay $1000 to take one test so that I don't have to do another one for at least a decade. There's some real money to be made in selling the idea of accreditation to employers.

[WorldMaker]

Bar exam and MCAT exam prep industries do seem to make good money in some states some years. An appeal to capitalism isn't the worst idea for how to sell the idea to employers.

(ETA: Though arguably it is exactly how we got multiple companies like leetcode that are building the worst of both worlds, the standardized testing and extremely spotty employer buy-in across a handful of non-federated competitors.)

[ravenstine]

Leetcode is just based on the wrong premise. No one has to be a good developer or engineer to do leetcode. Even the people who run Leetcode don't need to be good engineers. Hosting a bunch of reductive code puzzles is a lot easier than creating structured exams and proctoring them. This isn't to say that the latter isn't feasible, but the incentive is there to fool the industry into thinking that the ability to solve puzzles is a good metric for technical skills.

[adrianmsmith]

> I used to advocate for take home assignments, but now I really don't know what the answer is for directly assessing skill.

The way we do it is a one hour conversation with screensharing where they have an IDE open and complete a small test. They know we're serious as we're spending our time as well. An hour is still an hour, but more reasonable than a weekend-long take-home test.