Please stop the coding challenges

Nope. I gave dozens of coding challenges at my last job. It was as directly job relevant, and as low-stress, as we could make it. We were a Python+Flask shop, and we had candidates who claimed both those skills flesh out some API endpoints in a stripped-down sample repo. They could use their own computer, and their own editor, and collaborate with me, their potential new coworker. And I enjoyed giving the challenge, and liked making the candidate feel comfortable and excited to work on some of our code. We gave instructions ahead of time like "you're going to clone a Git repo, edit the Python, run the tests until they pass, then commit the results". You know, the absolute bare minimum you'd need to be successful at the job.

Some candidates with many years of listed experience had never used Git. That was a little surprising but maybe they'd worked at a Perforce shop or something. Nevertheless, they knew in advance they'd be using it today, and that's not exactly some obscure job skill we were asking them to learn and then forgot. OK there: "I didn't use Git at my last job but I read up on it, and I might have some questions." Not OK: "What's a clone?"

Others didn't have an editor or IDE set up. Just how? I get not taking work home with you, but you've never once written a little program to balance your checkbook or make anagrams or something else random? And again, we'd told them ahead of time they'd need it today.

It's OK not to be a Python expert, but if we give you:

  def add(a, b):
      return 4

and ask you to implement it, and you say you have more than zero days of experience, I do expect you to figure it out.

And I'll say it: we had plenty of people fail at the fizzbuzz step, often in astonishing ways. One memorable person couldn't grok the concept of factoring it out into a function like:

  for i in range(1, 101):
      print(fizzbuzz(i))

so that you could arbitrarily test fizzbuzz(1_000_000_000_000). They had the novel idea of capturing stdout and comparing it to a test fixture stringwise. Which, OK, it would work, but... I asked them how they'd see if the a test value in the trillions was successful and they mentioned using CLI tools like tail to check just the end. I did verify that they weren't just playing around for conversation's sake, like coming up with an absurd idea and exploring it for the fun of thinking through the problem. They were convinced that was the right way to write real unit tests in large codebases.

So no, I'm not giving up coding challenges, not until I see a higher passing rate among people who list years of experience on their resume. If you claim you've been writing Node apps for the last 10 years, by gosh, I want to see that you can at least write a working function in JavaScript.