[neon_electro]

I wish this was the stance that companies I'm applying to would take.

Words from a recruiter at a company I won't name for now:

"Unfortunately, at this time, we do not offer a take-home test option to our candidates. It is definitely something under discussion, and we will continue to evaluate this as we scale. The decision stems from a couple of our leaders who have had unfortunate experiences in the past with candidates who used outside resources to complete their tests, which has given them concern in allowing this as an option moving forward."

And then they added once I was rejected, presumably for continuing to try to push the take-home option and evaluate it on accommodations-for-disabilities grounds:

"I know we talked about adjusting the process with you for your preferences to do a take home test in lieu of live coding, or at least have you speak with a hiring manager before doing the live coding which is what we would be able to do if the team had interest in moving forward. However, the team did reach the conclusion that if doing the live coding wasn't something you were going to be interested in/had general trepidation around, would they really be getting a great read of your skillset if it's not something you're jazzed about?"

I hate how much employers seem to not want to evaluate candidates based on real conversations and instead rely on arbitrary assessments that don't map to the real-world day-to-day work.

[lisasays]

Even if their reasoning strikes me as quite muddled -- at least you got some kind of a genuinely human response.

Which is kind of the best we can hope for. Beyond that, people are people, and are going to keep on making weird decisions.

[neon_electro]

Good point - often I won't get this kind of detail in a rejection.

[hobotime]

Larger companies are sophisticated enough to handle accommodation requests. Smaller companies use them as a way of answering the implicit question of "Is this potential employee going to be litigious?"

My advice, if the company is smaller, open up to asking about accommodation after gaining employment and showing that you're an asset.

[Swizec]

> not want to evaluate candidates based on real conversations

The problem is bias. Study after study has shown that those "casual chat" interviews are worse than useless at measuring anything at all.

Kahneman's book, Noise, has entire chapters on this problem. The only solution that empirically seems to work are a) interview panels and b) pre-defined standard rubrics with clear evaluation criteria.

Defining those rubrics is hard and the results aren't perfect. But when done well, you can get up to about a 70% correlation with on-the-job performance. Nobody is known to have achieved better.

[thinkmassive]

Everything you mention seems orthogonal to whether a coding evaluation is given as take-home or live.

I’m glad to have a vigorous discussion about code I wrote during my own time. Go ahead and create a standard rubric that covers the project itself and the follow-up discussion. This is what I’ve done when hiring. It’s great because it demonstrates the employer knows what they’re looking for from the role, and that the team has sufficient experience to conduct a conversation in the relevant domains.

When I hear there’s a minimal number of interviews, and the main one is an intense live leetcoding session, I tell them I have no interest but if anything changes on their end I’ll be glad to provide sample work and have a discussion about it. The problem is these live sessions are extremely draining to prep for, provide no gain for the candidate (unlike writing code that can be retained), and they reveal practically nothing about the company.