The business of takehome assessments

I noticed the same thing. It seems take homes are mainly geared towards pre-selecting young single people with a lot of free time to code on the side besides their main job and other responsibilities, or who have no other responsibilities.

Now I'm also single and I have the time to invest in them, but I question the future of my career in tech, how will I be able to compete for new jobs later when I won't be, and take homes will be normalized? I don't remember my friends in other careers ever having to do unpaid work before getting a job. Perhaps I chose the wrong career.

What sucks even more is when you sink many hours in them and then just get ghosted, not even a rejection message, nada. I've already been burned twice by this. Or when the recruiter just spams you the take home link without first having a talk with you about the job details, the compensation range, if you're a good fit, etc. It's "first you solve this take home for us, then we can have a talk". Feels incredibly cold and inhumane.

It's been a long time since I've been on the job market - but even a decade ago, I had third-party recruiters who would forward me a take home test... and another successful candidate's solution, "for reference".

And even if candidate doesn't get external help, I'm extremely sceptical about time limits. Nothing stops someone spending 6 hours on a "2 hour" take home test, producing a better solution than someone who followed the time limit strictly.

It's pretty hard to extract a signal under such circumstances. Unless you're hiring for a job where a willingness to bend the rules to get results is desirable - used car sales, for example.

> Rather, they were the design studios, the lean web development agencies, the mobile dev teams based out of Eastern Europe.

Given a team of... let's make up some numbers.... {8} devs working on client projects that have {250} candidates to evaluate, how much time do the {senior} members of the team have to evaluate them? Note that taking {two} senior devs in such a shop out for {30 minutes} for each candidate for a live coding interview is {=about a week and a half} of nothing but doing interviews for each of them - removing them from other revenue generating tasks and a reduction of {at least 1/4th} of the work for that duration.

Extending this beyond 2 weeks of time means that the best candidates are likely to have found other opportunities.

Take home tasks shifts that time to a standardized "I can look at this sample code in 2-3 minutes and get a feel of if the candidate will be producing something maintainable or hot garbage."

At that point, one can narrow down the pool of candidates down to a small number that can be interviewed and decided with some expedience.

Unless you can ... demonstrate you only spent two hours. It's pretty rare you can do that, but... several years back I got a callback on an interview, and they forwarded me the 'coding test' portion. I got it around 1:30p, and I emailed them back the finished product around 3:45p, so.. a bit over two hours, including download and setup of their test environment.

I advanced further, but they ultimately chose someone else. I think I may have been a bit too senior/advanced for them, or.. maybe I was just a jerk in the interview, or... someone else was just a better fit? I'll never know.

I do know it was one of handful of interviews in the last 10+ years that was actually done well. On the technical side, they had a test git repo that actually worked - fork the repo, pull down, run the docker compose and everything just worked. I spoke to the woman who'd set it up and it was obvious she'd put a lot of time in to making it all as smooth as possible, and it was. I wanted to work there just because she'd put that much effort just in to 'a test'.

But I don't think this type of evaluation is a valuable signal anymore in the age of AI. Anyone could nowadays finish your take home assignment in a fraction of the effort it would take them without AI. This might not be relevant after they're hired, since they would likely also use AI assistants, but for evaluation purposes you want to assess how someone thinks about problem solving, not how they generate the solution, and then confidently walk you through it.

The best interview style for software developers IMO is the code review challenge. Show them a piece of code from a hypothetical PR of a junior developer, and ask them to a) describe what the code does, b) point out any issues they see, and c) fix the issues. You can have several difficulty levels depending on the role and expected candidate experience, or you can cherry pick these from your own codebase. The benefits of this approach are that it's a simulation of a real-world task they would be doing on a daily basis, it's a collaborative effort and showcases their communication skills, while also allowing them to evaluate yours, it's much less stressful than white boarding and quizzing sessions though still involves some coding, and unlike take home assignments, it can be completed in an hour or 90 minutes at most.