I hate timed coding exams. The "Here's a thing to write, send it to us in a week, it should take a few hours to do" sort of thing seems reasonable. As an inte

I hate timed coding exams. The "Here's a thing to write, send it to us in a week, it should take a few hours to do" sort of thing seems reasonable. As an interviewer, I do a code review of that (or of GitHub code if there's enough available without an exercise), and then send the interviewee the EXACT QUESTIONS based on that review, that I'm going to ask, a day or more before the interview. I explicitly tell them that they're allowed and encouraged to research and can even bring prepared notes. This process turns random questioning into, "OK, I saw some code, think through my questions about it and let's have an interesting discussion about it." This gives people time to look things up like you normally would when working on a project. It also seems to ease the candidate's down quite a bit, because some people are super great at their jobs and just don't interview well.