Since it was in 2014 and I don't know if they still do this, I won't name them.

I guess the lesson learned is to ask what the interview process looks like before getting involved.

However for this company, I applied online, they sent me a InterviewStreet/HackerRank coding test, and only after I passed that did a recruiter call me, and tell me they wanted me onsite for a week.

>"However for this company, I applied online, they sent me a InterviewStreet/HackerRank coding test, and only after I passed that did a recruiter call me"

This is a huge red flag in my opinion and I would recommend people not agree to this. Why? Because it shows complete disregard for the candidate. "Pass a test and you can speak to an actual human being." Its demeaning. It also shows just how useless many recruiters have become. Part of the job of a recruiter's job and good ones do this, is to get a candidate excited about interviewing with the company and get the preliminary deal breaker questions out of the way to see if it even makes sense to proceed.

And for me that was a perfect interview. First quick question by email to see if I was interested, then some simple test to see if I can really program, then quick interview to see if I have required domain knowledge (all questions were about knowledge required to program effectively, not abstract "how to move mount fuji"). For an introvert programmer like me it's a perfect interview schedule. Also it helps when you are already working and want to check conditions in other company without risk of being thrown out from your current job.

I gave up on those the last time I wasted 4 hours of my life on one of those tests and never even got a rejection email. It wasn't a hard test and I didn't do badly.

Nowadays I just point them at my github. If a body of open source isn't enough to get an interview I'm not interested in working there.

Agreed. My experience is that recruiters are pretty flakey people(and I'm being charitable in that) - they regularly fail to keep scheduled calls, fail to follow up after asking you for some times to chat, take weeks or even months to respond resume submissions for jobs they are posting etc.

I have no problem with competency testing provided I have already spoken to someone on the team and established contact and registered interest with someone besides a recruiter.

Are you against coding tests in general (especially when you have open source work to point to) or just as a prerequisite to speaking with someone?

Just as a prerequisite.

Yep, Skyscanner's HR people keep contacting me asking me to jump through hoops for them.

Initially it was a Hackerrank challenge, now its a (100% Javascript) "Full Stack" take home exercise before you even get to speak to anyone technical.