Agreed, but they are not alternatives, they are both possible. Also, I was not referring to super hard questions that require practicing "cracking the coding interview" for a month before passing. I've had "popular" candidates that could not shuffle an array, find a substring within a string or do some other relatively simple task that requires the candidate to think a bit. The reality is that of course, people with seven years experience should not need to do such tests, but in practice, there are many candidates with such prerequisites that can't even code anything. How they get the seven years, is beyond me. All I know is that they can't code.