Long ago, I had a candidate in an interview for a short term project. The person had an important hole in his knowledge, but seemed OK apart from that. I was a

Long ago, I had a candidate in an interview for a short term project. The person had an important hole in his knowledge, but seemed OK apart from that. I was afraid learning the knowledge required to fill the hole would take too much time from the short term project. So I decided to mail a take home assignment. I took about an hour myself to prepare it, the assignment was not work related, it was a completely fictional task. I think it was creating a HTML page of ~50 lines demonstrating the hole could be filled if the person had access to internet and all relevant docs. The person delivered the next work day, did well, and we hired. I've thought long and hard about this, and decided the assignment was a mistake and I would not do it again (sorry to the person in question). Why? In practice, when listening an hour to a candidate and let them write a minimum of code, you know if you have a complete weirdo who never touched a computer, or someone who is at least basically OK. In this case, it was a short term job, so the blast radius was pretty small even if candidate was bad. For longer term engagements, there is generally a test period and better vetting available. Meanwhile, I was in a position of power over someone else, and while the whole thing seemed minor to me at the time, I later heard the (junior) candidate was worried sick and spent way to much time on the assignment. An underlying cause for my mistake was the interview situation, which was very bad. Basically, I was in the middle of something else, and a project lead I had never heard of for a project I had never head of asked me to do a technical interview while the candidate I had never heard of was already sitting in a meeting room. Needless to say, I was completely unprepared. There wasn't even a whiteboard in the meeting room. So I basically adjusted by always being prepared for surprise candidates: A list of questions for most common technologies and a template for technically grading candidates were always stashed away in my locker from then on, and the people starting projects would keep us interviewers in the loop when a job would open.