Please stop the coding challenges

I recently ran an interview process for a relatively senior eng role at a tiny startup. Because I believe different interview methods work better for different people, I offered everyone a choice:

1. Do a takehome test, targeted to take about 4 hours but with no actual time limit. This was a non-algorithmic project that was just a stripped-down version of what I'd spent the last month on in actual work.

2. Do an onsite pairing exercise in 2 hours. This would be a version of #1, but more of "see how far we get in 2 hours."

3. Submit a code sample of pre-existing work.

Based on the ire I've seen takehome tests get, I figured we'd get a good spread between all three, but amazingly, ~90-95% of candidates chose the takehome test. That matches my preference as a candidate as well.

I don't know if this generalizes beyond this company/role, but it was an interesting datapoint - I was very surprised to find that most people preferred it!

Interesting. I think I slightly prefer take homes, mostly because they're not as hectic. The problem ends up being, that I don't have any guarantee that the other side will spend any time on it. At least with an in person, I know that the company had to incur a significant cost so I know my time is less likely to be wasted. There's already a growing asymmetry with job searches, and this is one more trend that accelerates that. I still have a non technical friend who's annoyed with me for not completing a take home years ago, because, while the main ask was obviously trivial, there was enough slop in the directions that I could kill hours trying to decide if something was good enough to submit. On top of that it was expecting some fairly narrow set of techs, that, while not difficult to pick up, were not something I was interested in trying to learn enough about for a chance to maybe help some company that "couldn't find any technical talent".