> For very small shops willing to incur legal risk or limit the application pool, you can do take home tests and/or lean on side projects, with an hour of explaining the nitty gritty details and choices. At scale it becomes untenable, because you open yourself up for discrimination lawsuits, and you can't convince a lot of people who already have jobs and families to do lengthier take home stuff.
At the end of the day, programming is just a writing job. So if you apply for non-technical writing jobs, e.g. to be a columnist at The New York Times or The New Yorker, do they not read any of your preexisting work on the grounds that it could open them up to discrimination lawsuits? Similarly, do folks who hire designers typically not look at their portfolios?
> So if you apply for non-technical writing jobs, e.g. to be a columnist at The New York Times or The New Yorker, do they not read any of your preexisting work on the grounds that it could open them up to discrimination lawsuits?
If you work in an industry where nothing is published publicly, and then demand to see people's side blogs and use that for hiring decisions, then yea that'll make lawyers at a big company a little skittish.
It's a different thing when your job is to write things that everyone can see, vs having your company own everything you do.
At the end of the day, programming is just a writing job. So if you apply for non-technical writing jobs, e.g. to be a columnist at The New York Times or The New Yorker, do they not read any of your preexisting work on the grounds that it could open them up to discrimination lawsuits? Similarly, do folks who hire designers typically not look at their portfolios?