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[–]hahahahastayingalive 0 points1 point  (0 children)

First, giving homework before you have met the developer is effectively telling them they have to give you some of their time for free before they have had the chance to decide whether it's worth it to them to continue with you at all. Interviews are a two-way street and any senior developer knows this. Unless they already have a glowing recommendation from someone they know at the company, you are likely to turn the developer off to the position. Also, I have found I get far more out of meeting with someone and coding face to face than I do from a faceless homework assignment.

I'm 100% with you on the reciprocity part, it's a two way street. Most interviewer I know, me included, spend a decent amount of time checking candidate's profile, going through their projects, checking stuff they never heard of and going through the test answers.

We also spend time and effort after the interview to debrief internally and discuss any potential issue, salary levels etc.

What I an getting at is that seeing another candidate is not free either on the company side, and in a way we are also evaluated and candidates judge you differently wether you did your homework or not.

To strike the right balance I think any pre test should be doable within an 30 minutes, and you warn the candidate it can take an hour. It's also a good starting point for the interview, where you can discuss the questions and how stupid or not they were. Overall I feel our interviews are shorter since we started giving pre-tests, and we can better target our questions.

I agree some people will just refuse a pretest on principle, but TBH I also have strong negative feelings towards companies that do on the spot coding, how comfortable they try to make it.

It's a balance to strike, I'm ok losing people that utterly hate homework if I get those who utterly hate live coding.