I've had candidates who can explain it all, and aced the take home. Failed all interviews. I spent 20 minutes chatting amicably with them letting them enthusiastically ask questions and then asked them to iterate an array and PR nt the elements. Print function was given. Array was given. They could not write the code in 40 minutes. I did this make good interview after the candidate had tanked their other interviews on tech and soft skills. Even if your Terrible on a white board you should be able to write a for loop.

Had other candidates totally ace the take home and flat out state first thing that they can't code and ask to switch to a non coding interview or to go home.

Some people spend a lot of time practicing to cheat. Given how much this industry pays it shouldn't be surprising.

Both of these happened 3 weeks ago when I was interviewing 32 candidates in a event. But several times in the last few years as well.

No I don't have statistics on this or pure confirmation... Kinda hard to get that info from suspected cheaters.

There are problems with every type of interviews a d they're hueristics for skill not a judge of skill.

Anxiety on the first interview maybe?

I would love to meet someone who was at ease, could explain code in detail (including talking about looping over arrays) and then NOT be able to produce that code.

The second one flat out cheated, but I bet they wouldn't have been able to explain the take home so you might have caught them.

Kinda weak speculation on my part but I guess I could be wrong. I've literally never met anyone like that.

What is the take home like? Maybe the code/answers have leaked somewhere?

The second one could infact explain it all. And could solve design problems. This happens a lot actually, rusty former coders or people who learned in college and never actually did it so it stuck.

The first one could also explain the code fine. Interviews 2 and 3 they were comfortable and able to design decent systems but fell over on code. This why I was given the task of "get any code whatsoever after you put them at ease"

You can cheat by paying someone for the solution, and it also comes with a clear verbal explanation that you can read.

What GP describes is more common than you'd think. Not surprising when the prize for cheating is a 6 figure job, and there's no penalty at all for getting caught.

I've seen cases where people had a friend, someone they were dating or a cs major roommate who it was very likely did the code for them (they mentioned these people encouraging them in interviews)

In the gp scenarios they said they were able to Google almost all of the take home and stich the parts together. The overall solution/problem isn't Googleable, we checked.

It doesn't have to be Googleable. There are many people offering to provide solutions for take-home assignments for pay.