@taprun - I understand your point. There are ways to offload hiring costs, and there are ways to share them. Should we pay software engineers to spend one hour

@taprun - I understand your point. There are ways to offload hiring costs, and there are ways to share them. Should we pay software engineers to spend one hour on the phone for a technical interview? Should they pay us? The answer to both questions is "no." We both give an equal amount of unpaid time to the process to show our commitment to moving it forward. Obviously marriages are reciprocal. If a company does not treat you well in the application process, that's probably a signal that it's not a good place to work. That company does not understand how to attract talent. FutureAdvisor does not ask most software engineering candidates to complete coding challenges (when we do, it is to give someone a chance to prove their capabilities when they have fallen down elsewhere, like a makeup test). We do ask to see evidence of their work elsewhere, both on Github and in live interviews. Only performance correlates with performance. There's no way around that. In my work as a recruiter, I spend a tremendous amount of time writing emails to candidates we really want to hire. That work, like a coding challenge, is all on spec, and it often doesn't pan out. I often feel as though I've wasted my time. It's difficult to escape the strange dynamics of the job market, where goods are not substitutable, and the buyer and the seller have many idiosyncratic properties and needs that can only be communicated through ad hoc efforts like coding challenges and emails to individuals.