I'm not particularly a fan of take-home tests. But comparing that to mumbling at a white-board, while a software engineer is pretending to be an expert psycholo

I'm not particularly a fan of take-home tests. But comparing that to mumbling at a white-board, while a software engineer is pretending to be an expert psychologist at analysing your ~train of thought~, and unfortunately, more often than not, someone in the board is only paying attention at how much of an WASP male you are or pass by it, where you need to do a task that you only repeat at interviews for a job that will not require that...compared to that, give me take home interviews any day of my life. Yes they are free work, but at least they are free work related to actual work. Live coding in the whiteboard performances are not part of the work. And the stress argument (that programmers must be able to deliver under stress) there are categories of stress, social anxiety of a live performance is not the stress we deal at our works. Sometimes I do good whiteboard coding interviews, sometimes I do bad whiteboard coding interviews, none of the situations I felt the merit was of the code or my knowledge of the subject, it is not a proof of how well a programmer does his job, is a somewhat related way of knowing if somebody knows who to code something and if he does not feel too nervous to code on a whiteboard instead of a computer to a bunch of strangers testing him. If you add that to the fact that some interviewers like be to randomly arrogant, you're missing some really nice but perhaps shy coders.