alt Hacker NewsThe problem with work-sample testing (which is commonly administered as a take-home problem for the developer candidate to solve) is two-fold:
a) it discriminates against people who cannot spare 4+ hours of focused time on evenings/weekends to work on the problem. People with multiple jobs, single parents, etc.
b) in the age of AI it is no longer a reliable measure of someone's skill, for obvious reasons
Unlike Yegge, I haven't worked at FAANG, but the companies I have worked at all followed the same hiring practices and suffered from the same problems as he describes.
Provisional employment (or, if that's not possible, then well-paid internships) solve all of those issues. The candidate gets 3-6 months of stable employment, you as the employer get a large number of work-sample tests, and you can see how they use AI and how much.
A standard interview loop kills an entire work day, and is preceded by phone interviews that eat several hours. Properly budgeted work samples are strictly better from the candidate's time perspective, not to mention that you can do them from your couch rather than under flourescent lights in a confeence room.
The AI thing is an interesting problem, but a solvable one. We continue to hire resume-blind.