Here we go again. As this seems to pop up quite often, it's seems like it's an important point for companies and candidates. I think that there are good take at

Here we go again. As this seems to pop up quite often, it's seems like it's an important point for companies and candidates. I think that there are good take at home coding tests, and there are bad ones, there are good in person coding interviews and there are bad ones. For me personally, I always liked take at home tests, and we are doing this at my current company. We have a small task with two levels, one to complete quite fast and the second level is if you really want to show off and spend more time on it. We use it as the main technical skills evaluation for the in person interview, because it opens up an actual discussion and we can talk about reasoning, see how candidates take feedback and how they can explain what they did. In the same time, there is another department with us that has a take at home task that I wanted just for laughter to try, it took me a whole weekend and it was insane. So I can see where some people are coming from. In the same time, we also had some cases where we paid the people (who requested it) for the time spent on the task, and we hired one, which was one of the most worst decisions that we made, because he turned out to be one of the most selfish and self absorbed people we hired. In the same time I've been through some ridiculous situations where I was left alone in a room with no phone allowed, no pc, just write on a paper some SQL queries based on some printed tables from a spreadsheet, or, in another case to write on a flip-chart some code to print the first X prime numbers in front of 3 people. This I also find quite ridiculous, but it was 8-9 years ago. In the end it's also how you feel as a developer about these things, if you are ok with take at home tests, maybe the company is a good fit for you and that is it, if not, you dodged a bullet.