[gchamonlive]

When hiring at my last company, I suggested we should offer two possibilities for the technical part. Either to bring a simple but well documented engineering project compatible with the role or take out challenge, which consisted of deploying a couple of services and a static website to a cloud provider using whatever means of IaC and cd pipeline technology.

I made sure to do the challenge too both to have a reference and to validate it.

Not sure I agree about free work. There are things you can't possibly evaluate in an interview. For a senior role, I'd expect good documentation skills and the ability to present tradeoffs of their designs, which is the purpose of these technical steps.

[zamalek]

It also creates the bar of "can this person actually code" that fizzbuzz used to cover. I would take an unpaid assignment 10 times out of 10 instead of a stupid leetcode session.

[vlovich123]

I would caution against the bring your own example. I’ve found myself nodding off and getting distracted because while it may seem interesting and important to you, and you may have done something legitimately cool, it may not be interesting to me, you may be bad at presenting it, you don’t have sufficient time to go into sufficient detail, or I may not have the requisite background to understand in the limited amount of time we’d have together. I think it tests things that aren’t a good signal.

[gchamonlive]

Depends on how you use it. If you use the project as a motivation to start a technical conversation it's ok. You had access to the documentation before, so at least you have an idea of the project. If the documentation isn't enough for you to prepare for the interview, that already tells you something about the candidate.