Requiring a take-home assignment, not just offering it as an alternative to an in-person interview phase, is a great way to systematically reduce the diversity of your hiring pool. It works well for some, but please don't require it of everyone.
In particular, it seems to me that take-home assignments are strictly better for candidate scheduling etc than in-person interviews, if time spent can be held equal. Maybe time spent is just not equal very often?
So you block off 4-8 hours of your life for this job you're really excited about. What is the employer putting up? Generally nothing. They get a sea of responses and they get to pick a few of the best ones. The 100 responses they got cost these candidates 400 hours of time for no cost to the employer whatsoever.
Take home assignments are fine, but the employer needs to put up something as well. Either pay for the time I spend on it, or have the assignment late in the interviewing process and have employment contingent on passing some known bar ahead of time. That is to say, I should be the only one doing the assignment and there should be no wishy-washy rejections.
There's nothing wrong with that, it's a competitive market, those who get hired are those willing to compete, not those who complain about unfairness about being asked to demonstrate their skills. Employers spend tons of time filtering candidates, even reviewing the submitted work takes time and effort, saying it's no cost to the employer whatsoever is not only untrue, it's naive.
Unless you've been in the shoes of a hiring manager, I'm unsure as to where this idea is coming from?
Having been a hiring manager, it is a horrible experience. Unless it's extremely naive, homework sets generally take time to come up with and formalize, and certainly take time to review the results for.
I suppose I can understand conflating the motivations of an interviewer with their employer, but it's not generally true to say that interviewers are just trying to exploit those they interview.
How do I know you wrote it and didn't merely paste your name over some project I've never heard of?
1) How many forks and stars do you have? 2) How often have you opensourced? 3) Have you blogged about them or created a documentation? 4) Why did they build each of those repos? 5) Commit logs... etc..
Very easy to develop such a framework.
One or two repos can be copied, but there is ample signature on a genuine open source contributors.
It's a one-off effort to come up with an assignment. So the cost per application can be extremely low. As far as evaluating them, the bad ones can usually be tossed out in minutes or less. Comparatively, the cost per applicant is basically nothing.
What?! Up until that point, typically, the employer had crafted the job posting, posted in on various channels, reviewed the responses, talked to promising candidates, and then give you the assignment. And a good assignment needs to be carefully crafted, a process that usually takes an order of magnitude time more than what it takes to prepare an answer.
I think your last paragraph is very close, but I think the thing that matters is "no wishy-washy rejections". Not being the only person taking the test or how much time the company spends seem like ways to make that happen to me.
Maybe I'm just completely wrong here, but I think most of the objections to homework type tests are being caused by processes where the homework test was in addition to the in-person whiteboard interview, not instead of it.
How would you feel about a process that was: some preliminary screening -> nominal 4 hour homework thing -> in person meeting to confirm that you're not a complete asshole and negotiate salary?
It is a sellers market. I get recruited every single day. Any company that disrespects me and wastes my time isn't going to be very successful at convincing me to work there.
Developers are the ones with the power in this market, and I have no problem throwing this power around.
And yet companies have an incredibly hard time hiring talent, even with so many other fish out there. Odd, that.
People need to start understanding their value as an employee. You create more value than you're worth; that's why companies need workers. You don't need to bend over for a potential employer. Plenty of other fish in the sea of employers, too.
And I am honestly just an average SF engineer.
The current engineering market let's me choose whatever company I want.
So, I am not going to waste my valuable time with companies that disrespect me, when there are a hundred more that I could be talking to instead.
The way that a business relationship works, is that the person with the power gets to make the decisions. And in the market that I am in, that person is me.
And I have no problem demonstrating my skills. I just demand that there is another person from the company, on the other end of the phone line or other end of the table, investing the same amount of time into the relationship as me.
If a company thinks that it is unreasonable for me to demand an equal time investment from them, well sucks to be that company, because as we have already established, they aren't the ones with the power, so their opinion doesn't really matter. They can go find someone else to interview.
Oh most happily will, even talking to you is a pain, I wouldn't work with you if you paid me. You're arrogant and entitled, you'd make an awful employee.
Maybe just open separate channels for people who have an open source portfolio. I have about 30 repos in my OSS, but still have to take these assignments. Its such an utter waste of my time.
That is a huge red flag, and means that they will disrespect me at work as well.
So that's an absolute floor of an engineer-hour per candidate: Anything less than 30 minutes to read through it and take notes is useless, and figure another 30 minutes minimum for a call.
If they're not going over the responses in detail and then talking through them with the candidates, then they're just wasting their own time because they're not actually judging anything.
If the "homework assignments" are just a scheme to get work done for free, or a competent engineer's time is not set aside to review them, then that's a different story. But as a fair test of programming ability, administered in good faith, I don't see the problem, and such a test is important.