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> What other role requires you to complete an exam to be considered for a job (or even just an interview). Moreover a 4-8 hour exam with no syllabus. No 'past papers' etc

As far as I can tell, essentially all of them. Of course, many of them have no practical way to even attempt to assess competence, so they fall back on "situational" and "culture fit" bullshit.

> I think this should stop. In it's place, developers can have a pet open-source project, which they submit with their application.

Problem the 1st: how do you verify the example project is actually the candidate's own work?

Problem the 2nd: building and maintaining a non-trivial open source project is a huge investment of time. There are many competent programmers who have a long list of things they must / would rather do when they get home from sitting at a computer programming all day. It's only more efficient if you send out 100s of applications, but as far as I can tell, competent programmers rarely spam 100s of applications. If you're just putting your toe in the water from time to time, taking a day off to do a traditional tech interview grill fest is a much more effective use of your time.

Problem the 3rd: evaluating a large, unfamiliar codebase is actually really hard. All unfamiliar code looks shitty, because you don't have the full context to explain the choices made. Very few people have GitHub pages that actually look good.

> I seriously wonder if we should all boycott dev tests.

Good luck with that co-ordination problem.

Tech interviews suck, for everyone involved. I still haven't heard a proposal for an alternative that isn't fatally flawed. (I consider "take home interviews" to be an incremental improvement on the basic whiteboard problem-solving test)

> Problem the 1st: how do you verify the example project is actually the candidate's own work?

Get them to talk about it in the interview

> Problem the 2nd: building and maintaining a non-trivial open source project is a huge investment of time...

Not really - in one weekend you probably can create something interesting and good enough for showing off to an employer. Also it will probably draw you in and you spend more time (for the fun of it) making it better. But you don't have to.

For those people who prefer FizzBuzz tests to implementing interesting stuff, I suggest companies provide the option to do a test for those who don't want to submit their project code.

> Good luck with that co-ordination problem.

A first stage could be that we say "no tests until at least an interview has occurred and the candidate has progressed to the next stage". That is in any candidates own interests regardless of other's actions - so wouldn't require coordination, just communication of the idea. It is in his own interests because the time spent on the speculative work could be better yielded doing something else, such as attending a meetup and generating more opportunities. Looking at it from a sales perspective of how to spend your time - lead qualification, lead generation etc. Why spend a lot of effort on an unqualified lead?

Even trivial code is fine on Github. All I look for is that someone can actually write a bit of code, and a GH repo helps me quickly asses otherwise I have to do more digging. I've interviewed entirely too many people who are clueless and leave me wondering how they have ever had a job writing software.

> For those people who prefer FizzBuzz tests to implementing interesting stuff, I suggest companies provide the option to do a test for those who don't want to submit their project code.

In fact a great personal GH repo could be to implement FizzBuzz in a bunch of different languages. I think most companies would get an appreciate the joke.

"Problem the 1st: how do you verify the example project is actually the candidate's own work?"

Have them discuss the code in depth. Architectural and design decisions, coding conventions, alternate approaches they rejected, etc. Pretty hard to fake this if they didn't write the code.

"Problem the 3rd: evaluating a large, unfamiliar codebase is actually really hard."

Good chance to assess the candidate's ability to document. :)

More seriously, though, this is again an opportunity for the candidate to walk you through the code.

Yes, but that switches the cost back onto the company instead of the employee.

No it reduces the cost to the employee, with no additional cost to the company. At least in $ or time terms. Sure ... a senior developer interviewer may need to fire up a few extra neurons.

That's how it should be.

Software devs have extremely low social status, despite pretty good pay.

Honestly I'm glad they don't watch "Survivor" and make us eat bugs or do weird obstacle courses. Seriously. You treat people like dirt, they're gonna resent it and complain on HN and some Stockholm Syndrome victims will back up the abusers.

Another example of the low social status is those horrible open offices, like a call center. Ugh.

Another example of immensely low social status is crazy work hours.

> Another example of the low social status is those horrible open offices, like a call center. Ugh.

So, where you work software devs are in an open-plan space and other roles have their own office?

Many other fields require competency tests. What other field requires you to do a potentially unbounded amount of free work in the open and give it away to everybody?

Not everybody has any major projects on Github. The lack thereof does not signal lack of programming aptitude. If somebody has done a lot of great work, but it was all for employers and clients, that doesn't mean they would do poor work for you if you were their employer or client. I find that suggestion much more distasteful than having relevant work-sample tests.

Licensing should be up to the candidate, and it could be commercially licensed and not available to everybody.

You shouldn't have to write a OS Kernel or a modern browser in your spare time either. I'd say it would be about 4-8 hours work that shows off your skills.

But if you prefer to spend that same time on some inane made-up problem for one employer and code something that you will wont enjoy writing and never use again, then as I said in another reply that there should be the option for that too.

> Many other fields require competency tests

Is there a field that requires 4-8hr competency tests where each test is wildly different from the previous, with completely opaque criteria. At least with the provide your own project idea, if the employer has fucked up criteria the candidate has only wasted a few seconds of their time in sending the zip file.

Kind of analogous to 'show me your portfolio' for a photographer. The portfolio should be enough. Unfortunately this is not possible as a developer as the source from your previous jobs is likely to be closed, hence the need for a personal project.

> Licensing should be up to the candidate, and it could be commercially licensed and not available to everybody.

> You shouldn't have to write a OS Kernel or a modern browser in your spare time either. I'd say it would be about 4-8 hours work that shows off your skills.

Well, this is a different suggestion. Now we're only talking about a few hours of work rather than a pet project. I don't think the licensing makes much of a difference since I probably couldn't monetize four hours of randomly dorking around. I'm still not a huge fan of the idea, though, because it sounds hard to me to show off (adequately) skills I've spent decades acquiring with less than a day's worth of aimless work. I don't feel like it would be very impressive.

> Is there a field that requires 4-8hr competency tests where each test is wildly different from the previous, with completely opaque criteria.

Nobody is advocating for eight-hour tests. The OP said they expected their test to take less than half that. And most fields that require competency tests (e.g. cooking, acting, music) will expect you to do it live, on the spot. Take-home tests are being suggested in the case of programming specifically because programmers hate being expected to perform on the spot.

> At least with the provide your own project idea, if the employer has fucked up criteria the candidate has only wasted a few seconds of their time in sending the zip file.

Not all criteria that someone might test for are "fucked up." If I'm looking for, say, somebody to do a math-heavy machine learning job, and your pet open-source project is a jQuery plugin that makes web page backgrounds sparkly, the mismatch between those two is not the fault of my criteria.

> because it sounds hard to me to show off (adequately) skills I've spent decades acquiring with less than a day's worth of aimless work

So you would be against a developer test too then?

> (e.g. cooking, acting, music) will expect you to do it live, on the spot.

Fair enough. So the developer equivalent should be a 1 hour technical interview, with perhaps a coding exercise on a computer within that hour. I am happy with those. To reduce the pressure the interviewer could leave the room for 10 mins while you code something. It is the do 4 hours work in your own time for a chance to get an interview or get to the next round that bugs me. And in reality I'd spend 8 just to maximize the chance of getting the job.

> your pet open-source project is a jQuery plugin that makes web page backgrounds sparkly

Yes there are sub divisions in the 'software developer' category. If you want a machine learning job you kind of have to demonstrate it one way or another. I argue that the option to show your existing code rather than do additional work on a made up problem is valuable.

Sounds good in theory. But if enough companies started doing this, I can guarantee you that Indian companies will spring that will offer to create an open source project for you for $100 to $1000 depending on complexity of project, and amount of activity the github profile would show. I wish I was kidding.

Same could be said of a take home test. You can outsource it for $100. I doubt it would get you anywhere at a company worth it's salt.

While that is sort of true for a take-home test, there is still value in giving candidates an online or in-person programming task that needs to be completed in a small amount of time (e.g. 1 hour)

FWIW most of the other high-payed jobs have some kind of entrance barrier too, usually in the form of having absolved a Univerity-level course and passed the exams.

Anybody can legally claim to be a programmer, so it makes sense for the companies to do some basic checking that a University would have done for them in other cases.

> What other role requires you to complete an exam to be considered for a job (or even just an interview).

I know of a place in Chicago that does that for a dev job.