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Have you ever actually tried a take home exercise? Or is this just based on your perceived concerns? In the years I have been doing take-home exercises for can

Have you ever actually tried a take home exercise? Or is this just based on your perceived concerns? In the years I have been doing take-home exercises for candidates, I have yet to see a single instance of a great take home leading to a terrible on-site or hire in terms of technical skill. There have definitely been great take-homes for candidates that we later chose not to hire, but usually due to challenges interacting with the product team, or in some cases too much fixation on technical perfection with no focus on business realities, etc. If there are a large number of candidates paying others to do their take homes for them, they should be asking for refunds. Second, even if this is a problem, there's a very simple solution. For candidates that do well on the take home, either on a call or on the on-site, do a live code review with the candidate and ask them to explain a bit more about why they wrote the code the way that they did. Ask them questions about other approaches, or what they'd do if they have more time. Candidates will be significantly more comfortable talking about their own code they wrote. It'll be quite clear if the candidate didn't write it themselves.

prewett 6y ago
I had a project give me a take home exam with a link to the git repo and basic instructions on implementing a simple algorithm, as well as tests, and FFI bindings. That took a couple hours, then I had two 1-hour remote interviews discussing the code. I thought the process was pretty good: even though I was annoyed at having to do the take-home bit, it served to demonstrate that I could navigate the project source code, build files, learn the FFI interface, etc. The algorithm itself was fairly simple to implement with a little thought, although they probably didn't care if I looked up how to solve the problem on Wikipedia. Personally I think that being able to figure out where the tests were, how to add FFI, etc., was one of their biggest requirements. Anyway, I thought it was robust but not too time-consuming interview process. I think such an interview could use a reasonably-sized open source project for this, instead of their internal code base.

prewett 6y ago

I had a project give me a take home exam with a link to the git repo and basic instructions on implementing a simple algorithm, as well as tests, and FFI bindings. That took a couple hours, then I had two 1-hour remote interviews discussing the code. I thought the process was pretty good: even though I was annoyed at having to do the take-home bit, it served to demonstrate that I could navigate the project source code, build files, learn the FFI interface, etc. The algorithm itself was fairly simple to implement with a little thought, although they probably didn't care if I looked up how to solve the problem on Wikipedia. Personally I think that being able to figure out where the tests were, how to add FFI, etc., was one of their biggest requirements. Anyway, I thought it was robust but not too time-consuming interview process. I think such an interview could use a reasonably-sized open source project for this, instead of their internal code base.