Please stop the coding challenges

> These high-stress, solo coding assignments don’t reflect the actual job. Instead, they put developers in situations they’d never face in the workplace, where collaboration and support are standard. When was the last time you had to debug an ancient codebase without documentation or help from a team?

I have had to do this, on numerous occasions. Sometimes there is a system that no one who built it is left, the documentation doesn't exist or can't be found, and that's it. This is not a great example. Being able to debug a program, follow requests around and see what's happening is a good skill.

What this example is really bad at though is that you pigeonhole yourself into developers. If you have a legacy php application, you are weeding out the java, python, ruby, go etc developers that do have those skills but don't know php and will be slower at it. Despite them possibly being stronger developers given a couple months of hands on php.

> A “4-hour” assignment can quickly turn into 8, 10, or even more, just to ensure it’s in great shape.

This I agree with. Suggested time can easily be gamed, so someone who has more time can look like a better candidate.

When I interviewed at Stripe, they had a "debug this!" question ready to go in a number of languages. (I think the list was something like: ruby, java, python, javascript, go, maybe one or two more.) I thought this was pretty great, but also seemed pretty labor intensive.

That is the way to do it, good on Stripe. Its definitely labor intensive, but I think that you either need to outsource it or be big enough that you can source the talent to build a half-dozen plus idiomatic and kind of big applications to make it a good test.