On a side note, of all the choices I prefer a take-home, as long as it is timeboxed to no more than 1-2 hours.
I have yet to see a 1–2h take home test actually be doable in that amount of time. It’s more like 8–10h to get going, have something meaningful, and code that isn’t inscrutable.
The pressure problem can be solved by giving more time than what would be expected in a work setting. If you expect a task to be completed in 1h, just give 2h. Of course that implies that you don't give a task which would take an expected 6h to complete.
Of course these are things to consider from the company side, if they think they want to hire people who can program under high pressure, they should probably keep that as part of the interview, for both the company's and interviewee's sake.
Interview pressures and job pressures are completely different.
One company gave out sample code and asked me to optimize it so it ran under 5 seconds. The exercise was in parallelizing or caching/reusing what you could per the requirements.
it was great because:
- problem statement clearly defined
- skeleton code provided
- about 2 hours to complete
- solved an actual, real-world problem