I have a small child and a full time job. It's really not very feasible for me to make time to do a "real project", paid or not. Especially if I'm interviewing with multiple companies.
Yea, I didn't consider that. My thinking was that the hiring process is such a time suck that the applicant should at least paid for those 'take home tests' and 'in person interviews' everywhere in that list ... but yea I'll go back to the drawing board.
It seems that you and a lot of people look at hiring as a zero sum game, because there can only be one standard. If it doesn't include someone, but changing it to include them would exclude you, then tough cookies. That's a very depressing outlook.
I prefer take home projects as opposed to whiteboarding, because my personal situation better allows for it - no wife or children, preference for building things, no NDA at my current job, and so forth. For me specifically I would prefer take home projects followed by a debriefing where I explain my design decisions over solving whiteboard problems. But that's just me. Why can't there be multiple accepted ways of interviewing instead of forcing everyone through a whiteboard gate, if whiteboarding isn't the best way for you to prove your competency?
At least we have lists of companies with different hiring processes as in TFA, so there is a small amount of choice. But we're still dependent on the goodwill of companies to make their hiring processes more tolerable.
