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I wrote an article about this same thing. Stop interviewing with ad-hoc code quizzes, live or take-home.

I've interviewed maybe 500 engineers in my career. I'm an early engineer of Instacart, 3rd engineer of Eventbrite, founding engineer of Reforge. Started 3 companies myself.

My interview is always the same:

1. Bring code you've written

2. Share your screen

3. Explain what it does and I will casually ask questions about it

You get so much information from this:

- How they think about code

- If they think it could be better

- Who they blame if the code isn't the best

- Personality

- Product dev glimpses

- Comms

- Sentiment



The thing is I dont even have a problem with a take home assignment as a method to validate some skills.

I just detest the practice of not giving anything in return for the time you have invested in doing the assignment. I would not complain about this if candidates received good fedback.




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