Take-homes get a lot of criticism on HN, but in my experience they're superior for all the reasons you mentioned.
I don't actually see pushback against take-home problems in the real world, mostly just online. When given the choice, most people would prefer a practical take-home over a whiteboard style interview.
For example, it's very tempting for a company to send out tests before doing much resume screening. Why should I spend 30 seconds looking at a resume when I could have the candidate spend an hour on a test, and save myself 30 seconds?
Or what if I set a take-home test which is supposed to take 1 hour, but also supposed to really to stretch candidates' ability and give the best candidates a chance to shine? Probably a lot of average candidates will give themselves a bit of extra time - and before you know it, I'm sending a "1 hour" test that takes an average of 4 hours.
Take-home tests are a lot less objectionable if you can properly guard against these problems.
But for your first point, that wouldn't seem to make much sense given the time investment from the company as well. It takes time to review take home tests, much more time than it takes to review a resume or even for a recruiter to have a quick phone call with the candidate. So why would they send out a test to someone first?
I've usually seen something more like this, which I think generally works fairly well:
1. Initial resume screening 2. Quick phone call with the recruiter 3. Usually some kind of technical call/interview with developer(s), engineering manager or similar, at the very least some discussion of experience and background 4. Send out the test, review it, call the candidate back in to discuss if they want to 5. Probably some other stage at the end
Many interview at a much less aggressive pace than that and I would prefer a take home when I am out of leetcode practice.
Having mentored a lot of college grads and also interviewed a lot of candidates, it's actually extremely rare for people to line up a huge number of interviews in a single week. It can be done if you really, really treat it as a numbers game, but it's not how most people do it.
> Take homes are untenable in that situation as half the interviews would still be a full workweek
Take homes shouldn't be taking a full workweek.
If anything, take-homes make it easier to stack a lot of interviews because you can do them at your leisure in your own time.
> I was already interviewing 4 hours a day with 3-6 people
I think this is the disconnect: You're taking time off of work for live interviews, but take-homes come out of "extra" time. If you're interviewing full time, a take-home is still more flexible than a live interview.
Incidentally, I have the same criticism of TripleByte. Sure, they get you on-site with companies faster, but their process takes a significant number of hours (essentially equivalent to its own on-site), and it doesn't get you out of any part of the prospective employer's on-site.
Take homes are bad because the time investment is asymmetrical. A company can just say to everyone who applies to do the take home test because there's really no investment on their part. At least with an interview, you know the company is investing an equal amount of time into the process.
Triplebyte used to be helpful because it did allow you to skip the initial phone screen but that doesn't seem to be the case much anymore.
What people need to remember is that there's a very real pecking order. Everyone will do Google's take-home but the local business paying local CoL/Prevailing wages? By the time some get to their take home, the A players are already landing in SFO for their final rounds.
The people that are the most hirable won't have time to do 20 interviews, they'll get offers almost right away.
> I think this is the disconnect: You're taking time off of work for live interviews, but take-homes come out of "extra" time. If you're interviewing full time, a take-home is still more flexible than a live interview.
The thing is, with a live interview it's one hour of their time for one hour of mine. With a take-home, it could be 4 hours of mine and... ten minute for them to look at the code and run a test suite on it. So as a rule of thumb, I always suggest favoring live interviews (they are investing more time therefore they place a higher value on the potential hire).
Many of the take homes I encountered also had rapid turnarounds. I would have 48 hours from Tuesday afternoon. A couple of times I was up at 3 in the morning as I had two of them due and had to abandon one of them as I just couldn't stay awake longer.
In hindsight, I should have realized the folly of that earlier, but I was eager to get as many paths going as possible.
Somehow they also seem to get all their offers around the same time to leverage them against each other.
source?
Edit: Oops, sorry, that's not true. 2002 was network. Everything since has been cold.
as an applicant, ive refused takehomes that were auto-sent on receiving the application, but if its after a phone call with the hiring manager or engineer its not so bad. but then, i did end up having to defend why i didnt do a bunch of parts ancillary to the assignment - 'why didnt you build a config loading system?' 'uh cause i timeboxed it and that gives you fairly little signal compared to the business logic'
When I went through the job search, I did close out a few applications because I found out I wasn't too interested in their description of the role (after a conversation with more details than that was in the job posting), or simply if their screening process wasn't worth my time. The one I lamented about pass through those interest tests as the job genuinely fascinated me.
A take home that is 1-2 hours (what might be the length of an in person) is fine.
A take home that is 10 hours of work on the other hand
1. They do not scale horizontally. You do a takehome and get rejected, then your effort has become worthless when applying to other companies. Versus grinding leetcode - it scales across a huge breadth of many different companies.
2. Often times a takehome is not. instead of an leetcode interview. It's in addition to the leetcode interview. So you end up needing to practice leetcode anyways. Now you just have more work to do - work that doesn't horizontally scale.