Take-home vs. whiteboard coding: The problem is bad interviews
A technique that I learned from casting actors is: you don&#x27;t have to be the candidates enemy to find out if they fit. If you ever find yourself trying to actively make the candidates life harder for no reason, you are doing it wrong (e.g. asking trick questions, expecting weirdly specific answers, etc)<p>Instead give them multiple different hard (but realistic for the position) problems and be on their side every time to guide them. Try to get them to do the best they can and observe them all the time.<p>This way you can get good feeling for how they are as a person, how they react to guidance and teamwork, and false negatives where a simple miscommunication leads to wrong solutions and a bad result, despite the candidate actually beeing good, are reduced.<p>If they constantly and heavily rely on your guidance that is a bad sign. If they actively fight against your guidance, this is bad as well. But in the end you are ”casting” them for a certain position within an existing &quot;cast&quot;, and sometimes a person who initially needs more guidance will do great after a while if they are in an environment where they can receive it, while people who actively avoid guidance could work just fine in a position where they don&#x27;t get too much anyways etc.<p>The opposite of this approach would be to ask an actor which pieces of [insert obscure european postramatic theatre director here] they know and if they know none assuming they can&#x27;t act. Bonus points if the project doesn&#x27;t have any connection to the topic asked at all. If anybody ever does this, it says more about the person asking, than the person answering. No — try really hard to get the best out of the candidates in the most accurate emulation of the job you want to give to them, and have a grasp of what they will get up to speed with in no time and what actually will get worse (e.g. personality traits). And if you areninsecure about someone give it another shot in a second round.