> The last time I looked for a job I was presented with multiple "take-home" coding challenges. I had to spend hours on them each night after working my regular

> The last time I looked for a job I was presented with multiple "take-home" coding challenges. I had to spend hours on them each night after working my regular job. It was exhausting. I would send it off and either receive no feedback at all, a "thanks but no thanks" with no constructive feedback, or an invitation... to come in for a whiteboard algorithms red/black tree interview. That's the reason I advise against them. Unless you are the top company in your bracket, your completion rate will also not be so great for a take-home (people have limited time: they'll sort by how good your company is). Sure they'll do Google's take-home but local business that does local comp/prevailing wages? It's at the bottom of the pile. By the time they get to it, the best candidates will already have an offer from a better company. That's why I prefer to bring people on-site as soon as possible, and do a little whiteboard (the point being that the candidate must... know how to code!). It's an artificial challenge that's really a pretext to have a technical discussion. Only time I advise to use take-homes is when you are dealing with a massive number of applicants from institutions that have a poor signal to noise ratio. Bootcamps come to mind. But then you end up with candidates that have the homework done by someone else and it ends up not being a good filter either.