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An interactive whiteboard / live coding session is by far greater than any homework assignment, in my opinion.

W/ an interactive session, you get instant feedback (either verbally or via emotional cues) into what they are expecting.

With a homework assignment, it's hard to determine which path to optimize for.

If a homework assignment is necessary, it would be better if that were more of a "probationary employment" type scenario, perhaps at a very reduced amount of pay, to only imply that both parties actually have skin in the game.

Even better, for helping me judge if it's a decent fit? Show me some code you're using in production so that I can code review it on the call. Surely it's not all hyper sensitive.

I work on the matching engine of a stock exchange. So it kind of is fairly sensitive, but I get what you mean.

> interactive session, you get instant feedback (either verbally or via emotional cues) into what they are expecting.

For some people, like myself, that is a nightmare scenario. I do not do well in these type of sessions. Which are also not even close to reflecting the real work we do. There are absolutely no meetings I go into that I can't prepare for [1] and there are absolutely no meetings where I have to solve a problem on the spot.

Being on the autism spectrum also means "emotional cues" are pretty lost on me.

There is also the fact that interviews have to be during normal working hours. Some people prefer to do a "homework" assignment which they can do in an evening or weekend.

This is again why we provide the choice. Not everyone is the same and prefers different interview and assessment routes. Both types are useful for different people.

> If a homework assignment is necessary, it would be better if that were more of a "probationary employment" type scenario, perhaps at a very reduced amount of pay, to only imply that both parties actually have skin in the game.

Really? You would refuse a "homework" assignment, but would agree to "probationary employment"? The later just sounds like WAY more work on both sides.

We have discussed something like this in the company I work for, but came to the conclusion that it just is way too much work. Getting the contracts in place and working out the insurance and tax implications and all that. It just is way too much work to do legally, because it would be the same amount of work to just hire them. However: we can't just hire everyone.

Maybe if you are already a freelancer beforehand then we could work something out that way, but in the jurisdiction I am in not every software engineer is ready to accept freelance contracts. It is a simpleish process to do, but not everyone does and those that do don't apply for full time positions.

[1] You can "prepare" for interviews, but more in a scatter shot approach studying all the interview questions that could possibly be asked. That is not what I mean. There is no meeting I am going into where I do not know the precise topic that the meeting is about.

I have been caught off-guard by coding tasks in the middle of an interview that I thought was more geared for casual conversation, and it's not always a comfortable feeling, but sometimes it can prevent either party from wasting a lot of time.

However, I've also been a few hours into a homework assignment thinking that I could probably go down some rabbit-hole to try to perfect something that I may have been struggling with, and sometimes can't determine the appropriate stopping point.

The "probationary employment" would be more like, I don't know, a gift card, or something, vs. something formal.

That way, if I totally bombed out in some assessment, no big deal, here's something for taking the time to apply, and maybe I could use the card to buy a book.

Now, I get that companies aren't giving gift cards away to all of their interviewees, so this type of thing would only come after at least the first round of interviews, etc.

More often than not, a non-interested company will often not even tell why they didn't pass the assessment, and it generally feels like a waste of time.

Yeah, that is what I mean when I say that either way has problems with them.

I had someone try to implement a whole relational database when the interview task was just to read from a CSV file and provide a REST API to the contents of said file using any tech stack. Impressive for sure, but unnecessary time wasted.

> The "probationary employment" would be more like, I don't know, a gift card, or something, vs. something formal.

We discussed something like that in the company. Mainly because someone asked to be paid for the time spent on the "homework" assignment. We came to the conclusion that there is no real legal way for us to do so. We probably spent more money on discussing the possibility of paying the candidate then what 1 day of work would have cost us, but the cost wasn't even the issue.

With an in person interview there was maybe a chance. Inviting the candidate out to the exchange, giving a tour of the trading floor and then paying for transportation, lunch, dinner and hotel would be no problem.

Though interviews are online now as we are a "remote first" company anyways.

We just can't pay for work without a contract, insurance, tax and background checks in place. We can however ask them to complete a test. Which is what the "homework" assignment is.

> More often than not, a non-interested company will often not even tell why they didn't pass the assessment, and it generally feels like a waste of time.

It sucks. It just is that nothing positive can come from providing feedback and you open yourself up for a lawsuit.

The downside to 'probationary period' is that as a candidate you're limited to a single company. If you have to spend a week/month at X, you can't really consider Y, you won't be able to give them the time. Then at the end of the week/month X gives you an offer and you can't even compare it to any other offer, because you didn't have time to get any.

Another thing is, if they let you go after the probationary period, you pretty much start the search anew. If you applied to another company while you were 'employed' by X and you managed to schedule another probationary period with Y right after the end of the trial period with X, you have to refuse them last second in case X wants to hire you. If you didn't search for anything while at X, you're off work for another week/month while you search for another trial.

If X ends up giving you an offer and you want to consider Y, what are you gonna tell them? Please wait a month for me while I work for this other company and see if it's any better than you? This simply doesn't work, for both companies and candidates.

Your proposed solution works, if X is your dream company and you will accept their offer no matter what. That's not how most job searches go though.

Whiteboard coding almost always devolves into leetcode which also requires at home study. You're going to be spending evenings and weekends coding something in either case.

That part is understandable. Perfecting your craft requires many hours of hard work and dedication, and you can never know everything.

For me, I work on a lot of open-source as side projects, so there's always the coding "something" factor.

> it is because some people have worked at very impressive jobs... they actually can't do the job

> In the hiring process there has to be some kind of skill test

Thats a contradiction:

1 - 90% of companies do skill tests

2 - you cannot trust the CV of a candidate even if the company they worked on previously also did a skill test

3 - you think your skill test will enable you to hire the right candidate

So everyone is doing tests and everyone is hiring shit candidates anyway?

That's literally proof that these tests are worthless.

Maybe if the recruiters actually knew what they need from a candidate, companies were clearer about what the job involves, they would stop hiring the wrong people for the wrong job.

There are some studies that claim a large percentage of people (40%+) lie on their CVs. As someone who hasn't done that and struggles to lie even in games, I have a hard time believing it. But even if 5-10% of people lie, hiring is a lemon market, and you definitely don't want to get stuck with the lemons.

Most lying is apparently to change start and end dates of previous employment to cover up short stints where they may have been fired for poor performance, but even if work samples/skill tests/structured interviews were 95% effective, you would still regularly hire duds.

I believe it. Even with the take home assignment people lie and cheat.

We had one person who literally hired a team in India to do it for him. Presumably planning to give his work to them later if he was hired.

How could you possibly have found out about this?

You sound so jaded, I don't blame you, but I hope you're not ever my hiring manager.

We asked him some questions about the code when he came in for the last interview and contract signatures. He didn't have a single clue about any of what he supposedly wrote. When we talked further he admitted to using a Team in India that has been working for him for a while.

Needless to say we didn't proceed with signing the contract.

1 - I don’t know the hiring standards of every company and that 90% sounds made up to be honest.

2 - We can not trust the CV. Maybe the company did a test, maybe they didn’t. Maybe their test are to our standard, maybe they aren’t. Maybe the candidate barely passed. Maybe the candidate actually failed but made up in other ways that might be relevant to the other company, but not ours. I doubt anyone would give us this information about their current or former employees. Maybe the candidate really did work on the projects he claimed or maybe he was only tangentially involved. That is a lot of unknowns. A test clears up what the person actually can do.

3- Yes. It works for us. Do we miss out on some good candidates because of this? Yes, but it definitely prevented us from hiring bad candidates.

Again: if there is a better way then I would like to know. I have not found one yet.

The better way is to treat people's time as important as you treat your own and your resources at your company.

There is a large company based in NYC that interviews thousands of developers a year, but only hires a few hundred. Each of those devs do a take home project that takes about 16 hours to complete. The project requires nothing to ask, so this company asks everyone. 30,000 hours is a lot of time - it's about 3.5 years of someone's life - and at least this time is spent each year by this company (and they pay nothing for it), not counting the rest of the interview process, because it is cheap for them to do this.

And we wonder by productivity is down :)

Respect people's time. If it is hard, figure it out. That is your job if you want to hire people and feel good about it.

I've tried to push my employer(s) to offer the dual paths. Like you I prefer the HW-style process (and think they are a truer judgement) but I understand why some don't like it. I wish more companies would support either path.

> In the hiring process there has to be some kind of skill test.

No there doesn’t. There isn’t one for the CEO is there?

How many CEOs have you interviewed to run your company? How did you conduct the interview? Do you think that same interview is appropriate for a developer?

The fact of the matter is that without the skill test there are way too many people that are incompetent and you have to have some way to filter those out.

I do not know how it works with CEO positions, but I am not hiring CEOs. I do hire software engineers and would like to work with competent people.

If you know of a better way then I would like to hear it.

Then fire those people. It's an easy solution.

It's extremely intensive to onboard a new employee; and extremely disruptive to onboard a new employee and then immediately fire them. It's also very demotivating to the existing team.

I would say it's a lot more disruptive to leave someone incompetent on the team and let everyone else make up their work instead of building a solid team.

IDK, schools do it all the time.

We would like to know who is competent before we hire them. The point is that we do these types of tests so that we don't hire them in the first place.

We can't hire everybody. I can't hire 20 people (then fire 19 of them) for the 1 position in the 8 Person team I want to fill. That can't work.

Just hiring someone and then firing them 2 weeks later is expensive as fuck. We can't just do that until we find someone actually competent.

Your "easy solution" is only easy if you don't think about it at all.

You're just hiring people who care to do these types of tests or are good at them, they don't mean they will be good at the job.

I'm not saying you don't do ANYTHING to hire someone. Obviously there needs to be some judgement of skill. But take home projects where you're judged essentially against how much time you put into them (I've personally had projects where they asked me to build an entire web app, it's insane) because ... it's a race to the top in a way here, if you spend more time it's going to look good, because the best projects are from people that spend a lot of time on them...

It's just ridiculous. You end up doing 8-16 or more hours of work for a job you likely won't get (it's free for you to ask me to do this test, so you ask everyone to do it).

It's not expensive to hire and fire someone. Not that expensive. It's probably worth 20hrs of 100 candidate's time, that's for sure. If you don't think so, I have a bad opinion of you.

I'd like to ask you, how many candidates a year do you have turning in take home projects?

> You're just hiring people who care to do these types of tests or are good at them, they don't mean they will be good at the job.

We align the Take home assignment very close with what the position actually entails. If you struggle with this assignment you would not succeed with actual tasks we do daily.

> Obviously there needs to be some judgement of skill. But take home projects where you're judged essentially against how much time you put into them

As I said elsewhere as well: People are free to choose to do a Technical Interview instead. If you fear that you would need 2 whole days you could take the 1 hour interview instead.

> if you spend more time it's going to look good, because the best projects are from people that spend a lot of time on them...

That is not my experience. There are people that just can't make it look good.

> It's not expensive to hire and fire someone. Not that expensive.

It absolutely is. Maybe not where you are, but where we are it is expensive. For one there is a big amount of paperwork involved, contracts, NDA's and background checks. We can't do this unless we know we actually really want to hire you.

I also can't expect a new employee to be productive right away. There is going to be a onboarding period of at least 3 months during which the employee probably needs a little bit more mentoring of a (more) senior engineer. If we would just hire 20 people for every position that we need to fill we would not do anything else then just onboard new people. So, YES, it is significantly more then 20h of 100 candidates time. Not to mention that the take home we give out takes maybe at a maximum 4h (if the candidate is fairly junior and has to look up stuff constantly, many people just do it in 1h).

Also: I think it would be HIGHLY unfair for the people to just hire 20 candidates if you only plan to keep 1. They probably quit their jobs or said no to other opportunities. We only hire people we see a long term future at the company.

> I'd like to ask you, how many candidates a year do you have turning in take home projects?

It is fairly late in our hiring process and it takes a significant amount of time from at least 2 senior engineers each time to review. I don't have the exact numbers how many times per Year, but we try to keep it very low and only if there is an actual interest on our side.

> People are free to choose to do a Technical Interview instead.

Ah, I missed this, and I'm sorry. My experience has not been this over 100+ technical interviews over the last 10yrs.

Almost all of them have asked for crazy take-home projects. I'm pretty bitter about the fucked process.