I dislike most take home problems, especially longer ones. But there's few exceptions where I could move forward with a candidate who refuses a technical interview. In almost all cases it's egotistical and a glaring red flag.
I've a BSc in one of the better universities for CS in the UK. I can barely implement any algorithm that I learned during my university years. The amount of times I've been told implement algorithm x, y, and z in the past ~10 odd years in my professional career has been zero. Conversely, the amount of times I've been asked to implement them during interviews has been way higher.
Unless you're hiring someone to implement such an algorithm, you shouldn't be using them as a test, because most, if not all, the algorithms we got taught during my CS degree, have one or more implementations to the point where I can just use those implementations. Heck, I wouldn't even want to waste time re-implementing it, and probably doing a bad job of it, when I can just use someone else implementation, who most likely will do it better than anything most people can.
So your claim is every company is coming up with new algorithms that they use for their tests??
The test should never rely on rote learning (e.g. implement Dijkstra's algorithm from memory) or require a "magic" solution (e.g. Project Euler)
I thought the second part of the sentence would be about how they don't actually have those degrees. If you say that you have the degree you have, that's not embellishing at all, and it doesn't mean that you'll be able to solve a coding problem. They're two separate things and you've kind of mixed them up.
There's two questions
- is the candidate outright providing false information (where they've worked or studied, how much experience they have and with what tools etc)
- does the true information give you the wrong impression about the candidate i.e. you think someone with this degree or with that many years of experience should be capable of more than they are
I 100% expect that someone with an advanced computer science degree can demonstrate they have problem solving ability. I don't really think that is an unreasonable assumption. I mean we're talking undergraduate level skills that are the bare minimum for an entry level position at my org.
If it really is the case that an advanced computer science degree does not convey computer science knowledge then it reinforces the need for screening questions.
There's no 'may' involved. It is not the correct term.
Here in the UK, embellishing your CV can be classed as 'fraud by false representation', which carries a maximum 10-year jail sentence.