Please stop the coding challenges

> When was the last time you had to debug an ancient codebase without documentation or help from a team?

> This is like asking a Ruby developer to debug PHP as a test of flexibility

> If the job requires specific tech skills, test those skills

Sounds like someone failed a coding challenge.

In all seriousness, you need to understand that companies rarely implement their hiring practices for the sake of it. It is usually the best their collective minds could come up with. Telling them to get rid of it without attempting to understand what problem they're trying to solve and without offering alternatives, is, to say the least, not a productive use of anyone's time.

I find in software development we try to reinvent the wheel all too often instead of borrowing practices from other professions. Let's have a look at what civil engineers have to go through to get hired at half the salary of a software dev, and let's incorporate that into our practice. That will make everyone a happy trooper !

> In all seriousness, you need to understand that companies rarely implement their hiring practices for the sake of it. It is usually the best their collective minds could come up with.

Unlikely. It's usually what the most senior person either read about or experienced in the past. In fact I'd say that it is highly unlikely that they did any introspection at all as to what they are actually trying to accomplish.

They just did it like everyone else because they believe exactly what you do -- that someone somewhere created the process with intention.

I feel like we've so lost the plot with tech hiring that we settled on what appears at best to be a local maxima.