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Comment by maxaf | Hacker News Reader

Would you have preferred to spend a whole day on an inconclusive onsite interview? Or perhaps a phone screen during which you're asked to implement a hashtable for the umpteenth time?

As I said in another comment somewhere in this thread, one day people will learn to do this right. Hopefully this will happen before programmers as a profession have decided to never take code tests again.

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Presumably you (the employer) have less time to do on-site interviews than to assign take-home projects, so landing a real interview is a much better indicator that my (the job-seeker) time will be well-spent. (Hiring is a two way street.)

At least an onsite interview typically includes expense reporting lunch, if not dinner, and maybe an opportunity to visit a city or a part of city you are less familiar with and possibly even sight-see a bit.

I don't think a phone screen is productive beyond a half-hour to an hour and anyone asking technical implementations over the phone is likely a worse interview than trying to whiteboard things (and that's still far and removed from actual programming).

Yes. The onsite means the company is investing just as much time and effort into the process as the candidate.

It's not just the investment. In a 4 hour take-home I learn close to nothing about the company I am applying for. In a 4 hour on-site I see the workspace, talk to employees, etc.

People usually have a coffee date first, before doing dinner. Here, you're doing dinner first, and then lunch. The first pass should be minimal in commitment, and give both sides a chance to get to know each other. They pass fizzbuzz or something doable in 15-30 minutes, you have a short convo about the company, and then you move on to the second pass.

You are right with that a whole day onsite interview is more time consuming.But personally, I think I can do better in a face-to-face evaluation than on a coding challenge where I have to guess the test cases from some vague description. In fact, face-to-face can show the interviewer how I think and what kind of questions I ask to figure out the way to solve an issue.

Maybe it is my lack of interview experience, since I only had like 3 or 4 so far, but I only 1 out of them left me with a good experience after the coding challenge (even if I did not get an offer yet).

So if they do well in the take-home test, you give them an offer? Or do they still have to do the all-day on-site after that?

Do well in the take-home test? Come in, meet the team, do the culture-fit thing. Then you get an offer. And this doesn't need to be an all-day thing. Who wants to keep selling the company to a candidate all day long? :)

Those other things being unpalatable doesn't change code tests being unpalatable.

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