1) I worked at places where they did not have a coding challenge, live nor take home. Colleagues were competent and it was a great job.
2) I (and many others) would rather do it in 20 minutes with interviewers staring at me, rather than spend hours of my personal time working on a throw away project for free. This way, even if I fail the interview, I'm only out 20 minutes vs hours. I'd rather go to church service than do that.
3) I like working on interesting things, but I don't like working for free. This argument is the same as saying developers should always be coding, even in their free time, for the passion of it. And that's what take home assignments are. It's a way to offload the expense of hiring onto the candidate. It's no different than unpaid labor.
If you can't weed out majority of unqualified candidates (yes, some will get through, but some will also get through even if you have a take home test) by just having a chat about software development with them, then the problem is with the employer, not the interviewee.
1) Every company will wind up with some decent programmers, no matter what hiring processes they have. That doesn't mean that doesn't matter. The perspective of one employee within the scope of his team doesn't correlate with the overall reality in the development field. It doesn't make your experience invalid, but your experience alone does not invalidate the broader scope. Chances are, you seldom encounter the mis-hires. (And yes, there are many developers I've spoken with who wind up working with people in development positions who actually can't code.)
2) And hiring managers would rather not have to waste 20 minutes taking to yet another someone who can't code to save their life. You'd be amazed at just how many hundreds of hours get wasted on that.
3) No one likes working for free, but you're not being asked to. A coding challenge yields no direct profits for the company. This has nothing to do with the errant "developers should always be coding" philosophy.
4) Your statement about how a decent hiring manager should be capable of weeding out candidates by "just having a chat" shows you have clearly never done hiring in any meaningful capacity. Any job looks easy to the one who isn't doing it.
Maybe you still don't agree, but I'm not just talking from personal experience; I've spoken to many hiring managers and software developers about this topic for years, and these have been common threads.
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I have to call bullshit on this.
1) I worked at places where they did not have a coding challenge, live nor take home. Colleagues were competent and it was a great job.
2) I (and many others) would rather do it in 20 minutes with interviewers staring at me, rather than spend hours of my personal time working on a throw away project for free. This way, even if I fail the interview, I'm only out 20 minutes vs hours. I'd rather go to church service than do that.
3) I like working on interesting things, but I don't like working for free. This argument is the same as saying developers should always be coding, even in their free time, for the passion of it. And that's what take home assignments are. It's a way to offload the expense of hiring onto the candidate. It's no different than unpaid labor.
If you can't weed out majority of unqualified candidates (yes, some will get through, but some will also get through even if you have a take home test) by just having a chat about software development with them, then the problem is with the employer, not the interviewee.
I'll have to counter your points, unfortunately.
1) Every company will wind up with some decent programmers, no matter what hiring processes they have. That doesn't mean that doesn't matter. The perspective of one employee within the scope of his team doesn't correlate with the overall reality in the development field. It doesn't make your experience invalid, but your experience alone does not invalidate the broader scope. Chances are, you seldom encounter the mis-hires. (And yes, there are many developers I've spoken with who wind up working with people in development positions who actually can't code.)
2) And hiring managers would rather not have to waste 20 minutes taking to yet another someone who can't code to save their life. You'd be amazed at just how many hundreds of hours get wasted on that.
3) No one likes working for free, but you're not being asked to. A coding challenge yields no direct profits for the company. This has nothing to do with the errant "developers should always be coding" philosophy.
4) Your statement about how a decent hiring manager should be capable of weeding out candidates by "just having a chat" shows you have clearly never done hiring in any meaningful capacity. Any job looks easy to the one who isn't doing it.
Maybe you still don't agree, but I'm not just talking from personal experience; I've spoken to many hiring managers and software developers about this topic for years, and these have been common threads.