Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it

If anything they are much more time efficient than the alternative - grinding dozens of hours of leetcode in preparation of live coding challenges. In my experience that is pretty much the sole alternative.

There usually is a generous time frame for take homes of at least a couple of weeks. This is so much better and more flexible than coding challenges - not to mention coding rounds usually take several hours for the multiple rounds. Basically there's no time disadvantage at all for take homes.

Also speaking as a recent dad, so I get the time constraints.

On a relative scale that might be true. In absolute terms you've already lost a high proportion of good senior people who might otherwise have been interested either way. Most good developers I know would just walk on seeing a 4-hour assignment that was actually a 4-hour assignment. Some would accept a full day of interviews if the employer had a reputation for being a good place to work and offered exceptional compensation but plenty wouldn't and I doubt any would for an employer that wasn't very top tier. Risk/reward and all that.

awful idea...

I mean.. in the tech world tho... Unless you are literally having someone else do the assignment for you entirely, what exactly constitutes 'cheating'? Isn't it common knowledge that most programmers refer to StackOverflow (or the equivalent site for devops) all day?

This is what I find so dumb about assessments and tests in the tech space.... there is no such thing as "cheating". Either you know how to google and figure something out or you don't. Most people can't just pull solutions off the top of their head. Tech is too broad. You have to do research.

And if thats not what you mean by 'cheating', I just don't believe people are applying to jobs out there and having other people literally do entire assignments for them.... If you can't do the work yourself, you would be fired in no time... so whats the point? Or if you can have someone else always do the work for you, why not still hire that person if the works getting done either way?

There is no "You might not always have a calculator in your pocket, so we need to test that you know this stuff off the top of your head" in tech. I will always have a calculator, robust IDE, and google. Tests and assignments for hiring in tech are completely bogus, at all levels.

I'm getting that way with interviews, too. Agenda and some sense of the topics, scope, and difficulty level of any "quiz" shit you're doing, provided to me early in the process, or GTFO. You don't need to keep it all secret for it to work. FAANG practically publishes study guides. Jim Bob's 3rd-rate B2B SaaS isn't going to go down in flames because they published too much info about their interview process. Meanwhile, making it a pop-quiz with a scope of literally anything and with everything about it hush-hush is a bunch of pointless stress I don't need in my life.