As someone who sat in interviews on the hiring side (or in the office with a colleague they hired) I must say that there homework was the best predictor for a c

As someone who sat in interviews on the hiring side (or in the office with a colleague they hired) I must say that there homework was the best predictor for a candidates performance. CV, resume, does often not say much about a candidates programming skill and style. I think for some candidates it really was a way to get hired when we wouldn't bothered to invite them for an interview (across the country). I do think homework shouldn't be send out as a default by the recruiter. And the hiring party should make clear about the intention. A homework should not be done on company product code, and it should be in some way standardized, i.e. we had a pool of 4 homework exercises that we send out depending on profile. As a candidate I like these exercises if they are not too big. I have applied somewhere once and they asked me to read a 16 pages journal article within 4 days, to present. (It was not a job in academia but industry). In the end I think I was rejected because coming from a different field than the interviewer I emphasized the wrong aspects for him. They were not aware of some aspects I presented and would have expected from a candidate. So there is a danger in vetting candidates this way. Just because you have them time, they don't need to be a copy of you .