[kbcool]

I'm an older engineer too and I am very aware of how frustrating this can be for techs of all ages so I made our screening test less fizzbuzz, do my work for me and gotcha questions and more real world, challenging, engaging and most of all interesting.

Examples include: How would you solve this at a high level, here's some code we know is broken, how would you both fix and improve it etc.

After all, both parties are being screened.

The other upside is that we also get to gauge communication and analytical skills not just production line coding.

Even after doing this, over the years I have seen a good 30% refuse to do it or just ghost at this point for whatever reason. Afterall, I've done it myself a number of times.

[malthuswaswrong]

over the years I have seen a good 30% refuse to do it

I'll do reasonable take homes, but I'll often pass on interactive coding sessions. I don't like coding in a browser, and I use my dev tools as a major crutch.

"Why did you store that value as a string instead of a long?"

"Because it's a string from standard in and I have no idea what bullshit inputs there will be so I can check it before casting it."

"But the user story said it will be a number."

Well if I had more than 15 minutes maybe I would have been able to gain confidence in the input. Something like that comes from many years of experience getting burned yet it's considered a negative mark. Some of these places are actually selecting for recklessness.

[sgerenser]

A take home that can be done in an hour or two is fine in my book. It’s problematic when they assume way too much background on the part of the interviewer. I had a take home from a small local embedded devices company want me to write a 2D DCT algorithm from first principles in C (absolutely no use of external libraries or code copied or based on any existing code) and I noped out pretty quickly. Unless it’s something I’ve done before, doing it honestly without consulting any existing code would probably take me days.

[w4ffl35]

This sounds like a well refined process. DM me ;)