Please stop the coding challenges

Why wouldn’t you? How should one evaluate a senior position, in your opinion? Are you suggesting a senior dev shouldn’t need to demonstrate any coding skill? (If not, why not?) Or are you suggesting that there are other faster ways to show coding skills?

I responded to a different comment but it's also relevant here.

You're hiring for a senior role, not a junior or mid.

Your candidates aren't fresh out of school or just starting their careers. They already have plenty of work experience. They already know how to code and have been doing it for years. A conversation will tell you much more about their approaches to problems solving, team work, and mentoring than a coding challenge will. Looking at their GitHub, their work experience and references will tell you the rest.

It's like asking a doctor to go over basic human anatomy.

You’re underestimating the variance in senior devs, and you’re failing to look at this from the interviewer’s perspective. Sometimes doctors should be quizzed on anatomy, btw.

They need to be able to compare candidates, and senior devs will be expected to code. Their goal is to pick the best candidate. Asking them to demonstrate their coding skill isn’t just fair game, it’s what half the interviewees actually want. A lot of people prefer being evaluated on code than on soft skills (just read the threads here for tons of evidence.)

It’s useful to know whether a candidate is going to be on the principal engineer path or management path. It’s useful to know whether they are actually good at coding, and how good exactly. And it’s also useful to know if they are willing to do what needs to be done once hired. Someone interviewing for a senior coding position who refuses to code during the interview is about as big of a red flag as you can have, and I’ve been part of hiring teams that will politely excuse someone for that, and I agree with the reasoning.

This might not make sense until you’re on the hiring side of things, but having a resume does not entitle one to being hired for a higher title and more money.

You'd think so, but during the interviews I did, there are plenty of candidates to senior positions who just cannot code.

They talk the great talk about problem solving and team work and mentoring, but once it's time walk the walk, they just can't seem to write any code - and we are not talking advanced algorithms, we are talking Fizz-Buzz level.

Maybe it's different for doctors, but as long as such people exist and apply to jobs, we need to ask programming questions.

This also means that if _you_ are applying to a job in a larger team for a senior position and they did not ask you for any coding questions, they either:

- Really good for firing people fast for low performance

- Have people at "senior" position which just give advice and nasty code reviews, but don't actually write any code.

Either way, it's a red flag for the company.