> You can't know for sure that dad/friend/partner didn't write the assignment either.

I don't follow what you're implying here, sorry?

> How about a 4-5 hours coding rush in the office, where you have to add a few functions or features to an existing codebase?

I work at a company where we actively keep a small set of tasks groomed for new hires. It's extremely difficult to keep a set of meaningful actually-in-the-codebase problems groomed at all times and totally infeasible that the person will spend less than a day coming up to speed on the infrastructure etc. The overhead of doing that is really prohibitive from an interview perspective.

I do think that for the most part, the coding problems need to be synthetic, then, not an active need in your codebase. I am definitely a believer in longer more open-ended coding challenges than 45 minute white board jams though.

The best option I've seen were recently-solved small problems. We would roll back a few commits, take that code into the room with the candidate, and pair-program a solution or partial solution in a fairly tightly-scoped time period, and then review the solution with another interviewer. That way, we've got an idea of what to work towards, usually still a pretty solid sense of where the problem exists in the context of the overall app, and we hit a couple of crucial skillsets - collaborating on a project, reviewing code. It wasn't perfect, but it worked reasonably well.

to trowawee: if it works for you, by all means! my only objection would be if the company is benefiting from your work in some way.

I think that we "benefitted" in some sense, because interviewees sometimes came up with better ways to solve some of those problems. Generally, we extended offers to those people, tho. I think it's just a slightly easier approach than trying to develop useful synthetic challenges - I haven't really seen a synthetic challenge that felt like it accurately approximated what day-to-day life is like in a company, which as an interviewee I am most interested in.

I think this is fine as long as it's a bottle problem -- something for the interview that is not of benefit to the business. If a company is asking you to do unpaid work on their existing database without paying you, it's unethical.

I think in general asking you to do a coding assignment in the office is better than asking you to do homework because there is a cost (in terms of time invested) to the company. For homework, a company can ask dozens of applicants to invest hours of their time at minimum cost to the company, even when some of bthose applicants had no chance to begin with. Here, they're forced to be choosier.