Coding Interviews – Why you shouldn’t give homework

I haven't truly been on the job market since 2010, but when I have casually looked take homes before the interview stage were a huge turnoff. The issue was I never felt the employer had "skin in the game" for the effort it would require, and I wasn't confident I was at an interview stage with a high likelihood of getting an offer. If I'm getting interviewed by 4 people they are spending a chunk of effort on me- I know they are at most 4-8 people who are getting the same treatment. With a take home test they may be considering an order of magnitude more candidates and the payoff on my time is much lower.

I know people will object "well at my company that is the case! We only use them for our final candidates." That may be true, but there are plenty of counter examples out there, including one that used it as an initial screen to get to an interview and then forgot to take down the job posting, so had multiple people complete an assignment for a job that didn't exist.

So I generally agree with the author, but I'd add one thing - make sure the candidate knows how far in the process they are and that they are likely to get a job.

This hasn’t been my experience at all.

As a candidate, take-homes have been great to work on from the comfort of my home with my own preferred tools without external pressure.

As a hiring manager, take-homes have bee preferred by all of the candidates that have been given an option to do a take-home or do a live in-person interview. Nobody wants the in-person interview when take-home is an option.

These blog posts that suggest asking candidates to spend a few hours working on a take-home problem is unreasonable are getting to be out of touch. In the real world, people can find a couple hours over the course of a week to do a take-home assignment. If someone is too busy that week, we can delay giving them the assignment until next week.

Literally any (in)activity in my life has higher priority than free labour for you.