Or, they don't even do the task, but pay someone else to do it for them, so eventually all these take-home tests just go to the same set of expert test-takers who already solved all these tasks. Very efficient, and also worse than useless as a screening tool: the dishonest candidates most willing to cheat will score the highest.

> If a candidate chooses to burn a whole week working on it that can be safely left up to them I think. But a take home test is not unfair because they decided to burn that much time on it.

Of course it is. Worse: it creates adverse selection, from the interviewer perspective.

Top candidates who are looking for their next job while working a demanding full time job will not be able to dedicate more a minimum of time to each of the many take-home tests they are asked to do.

Meanwhile, desperate poor candidates will dedicate x10+ the time (or simply cheat) to pass.

So as an interviewer, you'll end up passing the random desperate candidate who somehow got through your earlier screening, and any good candidate with multiple other options and commitments will submit work that looks far inferior.

We love talking about productivity here. You're telling me employers will systematically fail the candidates who performed most productively in their process, because of a speculation they took too much time?

Any candidate capable of actually inventing a time machine should certainly be hired.

No candidate wants to be entered in the Hunger Games for who has the most time to sink into a take-home.

Also, such a system does not prevent cheating, which is really the worst issue here.

I don't want an architecture astronaut who is never going to ship anything.

An 80% solution when I need it is infinitely more useful than a 100% solution that's months late.

Limits are fine if you ask me. Give me a couple days in which I can do this on my own time and if my kid needs me for something 10 minutes after I started I can deal with it and just come back to the test an hour later. Specific hours? Screw you, not even gonna start.

I need a stable system that can tolerate the real world and handle messy inputs without shitting the bed. A new hire that shows they consider their inputs and handle edge cases is a better fit to me than someone who focused on that 80% solution and didn't bother sanitizing inputs and crashes because of it.

We’re just gonna run with the assumption that anyone who’s applying for a job has their own development machine.

I will never understand the desire to handicap interviewees like that. I recently passed an live-coding interview in which I was asked to use an unfamiliar library; bc it was open-book I was able to look up its docs and use it to solve the problem. At one point I also hopped onto MDN to confirm a browser API. The ability to search and effectively leverage available resources is fundamental to our profession. Closed-book "pop quiz"-style puzzles -- where the surface area of the relevant material is unbelievably vast, and the relevance of the problem to the job's requisite skills is tenuous at best -- are highly problematic.

I do strongly agree that people should be able to use whatever resources they normally have (google, mdn, autocompleting editor, etc.). This is how they would work on the job. Getting quizzed on easily referenced random trivia about language features is so dumb.

If you gave me such a code challenge, I'd probably take it as a sign that company culture is to put employees under pressure and I would immediately decline.

I guess it depends on how the company uses it - if they just stick the take-home in as an extra filter vs trying to replace live interview time