That sounds to me like fight or flight response. Happens to me sometimes, and when it does I can’t code worth a damn, in spite of having a decade and a half of experience on the top projects at some of the top companies in the industry. This, in fact, happened to me the first time I interviewed with Google: I bombed that pretty spectacularly. The second time I applied I already had a couple of very generous offers elsewhere, so I didn’t care as much and was less nervous during my interviews, so I passed.
Hence the take home interview. At least at the last company I worked at we began doing these because we could tell that the stress was filtering out some otherwise decent candidates. At least that was one of the reasons, it also gave us a chance to talk about technical solutions the candidate produced in a more stress-free way.
I don't think this assertion that the technical interview is inherently filtering out great candidates is being very honest (you responded similarly to another comment of mine the same way). One quality being tested is "can you try to do the thing that we're asking for?" That's a measurement in competence and the willingness to get something done. If said candidate is saying "this test is ridiculous and a waste of my time!" then my common sense instinct will say that they're probably not a great fit even if they're the greatest programmer in the world. At least on the take homes I've issued they shouldn't be taking more than a few hours. These stories about creating applications that take 3 days are certainly problems and recruiters need to lighten up a little, but I don't think the take home is inherently flawed just by its existence.
Most senior devs have a family, value work/life balance, and currently have another job. I don't expect them to take their work home past 5 while they're working with me, so why should I expect them to do that before I'm even paying them?
Finding a new job isn't part of your current job. It is over and above. If you aren't willing to put in a few hours after work for something not related to your job, why are you even bothering to go looking for a new job anyway? Are you job hunting on your current employer's time?
Almost too obvious solution: do an initial phone chat to filter qualified candidates into a small pool and then pay your final round of candidates a nice rate to complete a take home project. Bonus points if you can make it something that you can actually use at your company.
This is a terrible solution at many levels. Paying someone who isn't on your payroll (yet) needs a lot of bureacracy on both sides (e.g. taxes).
And even if it's paid, it's still a not-insignificant time investment for the applicant. They're probably applying for several gigs and take home assignments would quickly turn into a full time job, and filing the tax paperwork could take more time than the coding.
And finally, assigning a job that would actually get used at a company pushes up the complexity level, the need to understand the context. This would also make me very suspicious about the motives of the company.
In my company, we give a "fizzbuzz" level assignment on the whiteboard (or their own laptop if they prefer). The purpose is to weed out the applicants who can't code at all (makes a surprisingly large portion of applicants). Additionally, we've noticed that the ones who are good programmers will ace these tests.
I don't think that whiteboard assignments or takehome work is a good way to assess how good a programmer is. A 15-30 minute smoke test with a binary result (the applicant can or can not code at all) is good to filter out bad applicants but not to distinguish good from excellent.
The take home exam is quite a bit more of an efficient filter than a blanket phone screen. Anything less than a 20 minute call isn't going to tell me much.
Personally I think it'd be fine to e-mail back and say "sorry I don't have time to work on this with my current schedule, could I do an in-person interview instead?" That's me though, I would hope the rest of the industry is willing to work with people. Even just the response to the e-mail would tell me that they're competent enough to know their time management and that they have limited bandwidth. At some point you need to make a sacrifice of time though. Even if your hotel and plane ticket are being paid for to fly out to the place of business, you need to take that time off to go in for the interview.
I'd prefer to do a lot of that at home personally.
> Personally I think it'd be fine to e-mail back and say "sorry I don't have time to work on this with my current schedule, could I do an in-person interview instead?"
What happens instead is that you just don't ever hear back from candidate.
>I don't think this assertion that the technical interview is inherently filtering out great candidates is being very honest
There are plenty of people telling you the same thing, you just don't want to hear it. Here's a data point. I would never do it unless I was absolutely desperate. I mean about to lose the house desperate. There are just too many other companies around.
I mean if you are trying to pay junior rates and maybe pull a decent mid-level guy, it may be a good tactic. If you are at all interested in top talent, you'll turn many if not most of them away. Unless your company offers something no other company in the area offers, tops generally have no time or patience for that, especially if they just handed you a loaded resume with tons of references.
If you're just a boring ole company like all the other companies, believe me, you're turning top people away.
at least the take home test is similiar to a real world issue. Tons of issues with it but it's better than the live code remotely (live coding on paper somehow clicks well for me)
Yeah, I’d vastly prefer that, but it should take no more than a couple of hours, not days. In fact we use a 1-hour take home to screen candidates, with great results. The assignment is pretty simple, but you can’t find a solution on the internet. We have found this to be way more effective than a phone screen (which we also do, to let the candidate also ask questions early on).
When I interviewed at Google it was 2006 and they had a reputation for rejecting nearly everyone. I was still a student! So I rocked up to the interviews calm as calm could be because I didn't believe for even a second that I'd actually get the job and really, the whole thing seemed like an entertaining and potentially interesting mistake.
I did that with the google phone screen. It didn't help that the interview really took a "well that's interesting" approach and basically killed the interview.
