Wait, what is the difference between taking the time for an interview (no matter if via phone or in-person) and one for a gate-filter task?
In practice there’s a pervasive phenomenon called asymmetry of effort. The hiring manager may crib a task set either from a perfunctory google search or their own body part. The sum total of time spent on their part is often five minutes, including coming up with the problem and their review of your code.
This follows no industry standard, and I can count multiple experiences where they were too inept to “grade” the homework assignment, thinking it didn’t work when it did, or that the problem set was impossible.
The reason senior engineers in particular turn down homeworks is because they’ve been burned by them before, and the average hiring engineer tends to know less than they do (but as the hiring manager, can’t assess it, mistaking competence for arrogance or ineptitude).
When a company is not willing to invest the same amount of time to interview as they ask of the candidate, it’s a strong signal of how serious they are as a quality employer.
When job hunting as a senior, hearing about take homes (esp. early stage ones) is the young person’s dating equivalent of considering a relationship with someone divorced twice and a felony. You just get conditioned to pass up kissing frogs.
Everything else is simply busy work for all parties because it doesn’t tell you anything you don’t already know, plus it scares away quality candidates.
Does anyone know if having different tracks is legal?
You don't even really need a probationary period in an "at will" state.
At some point, you either trust the credentials from universities and certification bodies, and take what the resume says at face value, or you have to try to reinvent some wheels, and re-discover that eliminating the phonies and mimics is a very difficult problem that even the experts can't solve entirely.
I don't know what the conversion factor is between running a fruitless job search filled with cargo-culted bozo tasks, and just randomly picking the first vaguely suitable candidate off the stack and letting them run for a few months, but I suspect that filling the position quickly and painlessly is probably worth about one month of having a 0%ile employee, or six months of a 20%ile, or keeping a 40%ile employee until they retire. This rests on the presumption that some work done right now is worth more than the same amount done some time in the future, and that higher %ile-ranked candidates will be less tolerant of any stupid hiring games.
At my current employer, our recruiting manager has a preliminary talk with the candidate and if there seems to be mutual interest in continuing in the process, she sends a simple task. The task was defined by the technical team, it should be short (no more than an hour) and it has nothing to do with our work.
Once she receives the submitted task, we ask everyone in the tech team to make a review. We do have a "gold standard implementation", but we know that no one will get it and we don't care. We had cases of candidates that misunderstood the task and we had no issue with giving them a second chance or simply asking what was unclear and what would they do differently had they had got the intended requirements.
We just want to filter the obvious "no hires" from the ones with potential. The recruiting manager communicates this even before the task is submitted to them. I am yet to hear any story of any candidate that was interested in the position but walked away due to the way that the process is conducted.
Thank you for making my point. Why would you ever hear about it?
This is the "British Rails" fallacy in action. (A long time ago, the British Rail organization had heard complaints that residents of a local community weren't satisfied with the once-daily train service it received. Its response was there was no need for a second train, because at the times considered, no one was standing on the platform waiting to board it).
Nice coconut earmuffs.
Seems like the one that does not want to listen is you.
The take home task is only communicated during the preliminary interview with the recruiter (i.e, it is not something that is required to start the application process) and we do get feedback from candidates that have withdrawn their application. And while we had cases of people that withdrawn for various reasons (company size/culture, process adopted, being too "startupy" for a German company, or even simply getting a better offer somewhere else) the take-home task is yet to be mentioned as an issue.
In the end, your reasons for being against take-home tasks are not really against the idea of take-home tasks, just some of the implementations you've been through. Your "point" does not stand.
So essentially about 4 hours of time. What makes this different from a company that wants 4 interviews from different managers, which likely takes up more time plus all of it being fixed time slots, versus having one hour of work that you can work on at your own pace?