[alexyang21]

I couldn't agree more.

While it's not compilable, I did reach out to a few of the 5-star test designers and asked them this question. How teams use their tests (both in weight and stage) varies a lot, but the well-designed tests usually featured as a central component of the hiring process. They were often given at the stage right before the final round of interviews, but occasionally earlier. The 5-star test designers I spoke with weighted the test heavily because it: 1. helped them reduce bias, identifying great candidates even when they didn't have the backgrounds they expected 2. gave them a foundation for the future interviews. It's less stressful on candidates when they're already familiar with the code being discussed live (because they wrote it!)

Anecdotally, on-the-job performance of the candidates they ultimately hired seemed to correlate with performance on the test. I realize this is very hard to compare against other evaluation approaches though!