The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework
Our industry&#x27;s hiring practices are absolutely obnoxious. In an ideal world, you could trust someone&#x27;s resume. e.g. &quot;I&#x27;ve written large production programs in C.&quot; Ok, great, so then clearly this person knows C so there should be no need to dissect code or run them thru some linked list algorithm and see if they know how to use pointers correctly.<p>Yet, we do. Ok, then what about open source contributions (if they have them)? Well, sure, but we don&#x27;t really know, for sure, if that code is their own or if they indeed truly wrote it, can we? So we can&#x27;t count on it. It helps but it can&#x27;t be an automatic &quot;this person passes the technical&quot; signaler.<p>So maybe the person shares <i>actual</i> code and walks us through it that they wrote, even if not open source? Again, we can&#x27;t know for certain it is their own code and not some friend who wrote it for them 2 years ago that they claim is their own. Or was a teammate&#x27;s, or what-have-you. So we can&#x27;t count on that either.<p>Apart from getting a candidate to actually pump out some code, even trivially, we don&#x27;t really have a way to de-facto verify that the person says they can do what they say they can do, short of a personal reference from someone, say, in the company already that knows and has worked with the person in the past.<p>I absolutely hate this practice of having to constantly &quot;re-prove&quot; to the next employer that someone knows how to write software. It&#x27;s extremely redundant and yet we keep on doing it, with no real hope of actually making it better.