Ouch. I knew I saw red flags in your original post. This seals the deal.
All of these are policies I've worked hard to implement to create the absolute best environment in the world for my engineers to thrive. I've had to fight for them since they aren't cheap. It hurts me when someone says taking an hour out of their week to do a coding interview isn't worth it when I've taken dozens to hundreds out of mine to make their job as easy and enjoyable when they get accepted into our culture. It's insulting to me to say that asking for an hour of your time is not worth everything above and much more that I've strived for to make our company a fantastic place to work at.
So, like I said, what red flags did you see exactly?
1. Mentioning firing in the very first post when talking about hiring.
2. Take home interview tests, showing you don't value your potential employee's time.
3. And this is an interesting one: accusing someone of having a poor work ethic when you don't know them and they didn't show any sign of it. This is a big red flag because it points to you equating disagreements with performance, which makes #1 even more of a red flag.
2. If employees don't think an hour of their time is worth it to work for us, then they are clearly not a fit. Those people obviously don't value working for us. We have the easiest, fastest, most painless interview process of any company I have ever worked at, by design. We don't do whiteboard questions, we don't do 8 hour multi-person tech review days, we don't ask odd l33tcode questions or brain teasers, we don't make you wait weeks to hear back from us, we never ghost anyone, and we usually give a decision within 72 hours. Asking an hour to prove you can code seems perfectly reasonable given most companies ask for significantly more of your time. Every employer I've worked at before took up 2-5x as much time interviewing as we do. If that hour is what is preventing you from working for us, go work somewhere else as it tells me a lot about you and how much you'll value working for us.
3. I apologize for that. It was uncalled for.
Maybe you just haven't hired or worked with someone who can't code yet.
It's not the liars that are being filtered out (they're easy to detect), but its those who genuinely believe they are good developers.
I've at least gotten rid of l33tcode, 8 hour technical interviews, whiteboard BS, in-person high-pressure timed coding exercises, brain teasers, etc.. All the worst stuff. I thought that was good enough. Apparently asking for an hour of someone's time to get a great job is too much these days.
This is what a ton of candidates end up doing, knowing that others are going to as well. Especially when the take home test could be sent to a massive number of people.
Spend a few hours with me and watch me code. Show you care. I'm not rejecting the idea of spending time coding for an interview.
They had a take home. Ridiculously simple. Build a 4 endpoint CRUD API for bear sightings. Took about 20 minutes in Python Flask. Sent it in, immediately moved to the next round which was two weeks away.
You know what I did in those two weeks? I rebuilt the same API in Node, Typescript, Rust, Go, C++, Ruby, Django, Sanic, and I think a few more.
Then I deployed it on App Engine, Lambda, EC2, Google VM, Kubernetes, Elastic Beanstalk, ECS, and my local home dual Xeon server. (while keeping the compute size of all of the cloud offerings as equal as possible)
Then I benchmarked them all. Turns out how you deployed it made little difference but the language made a huge difference. Sanic came in 2nd place while Rust was far and away the winner.
Then I wrote a 10 page report including my methods, code, charts, and tables showing the results.
Two weeks later when I arrived at my onsite interview, I was scheduled to meet with 8 people for 8 hours to talk BS l33tcode questions. You know what I did? Explained what I had spent my time doing. They loved it.
I got a very nice offer that day and worked there for 3 years.
Sometimes the amount of effort you show a company how much you want to work there is what can land you the job.
I didn't ask to be paid for that time and I was employed elsewhere. I did this in the evenings and weekends during what would otherwise be social media downtime.....and it was fun. I explored new technologies, learned several new languages, and expanded my abilities as a developer. I don't regret that time investment one bit.
And you're saying you can't take one hour to do a take home?
That DOES tell me a lot about you.
edit: To be clear, this didn't take away from any of my other activities. I still ate out, spent time with friends, went out, etc.. This just took away from useless social media time and turned it into something productive. I also had a lot of fun not only exploring everything but also knowing I'd have a lock on a well compensated position and be in control of my interviews instead of their potentially being disinterested in just another candidate. It was time very well spent. I don't nearly expect this kind of investment from any of our applicants but if someone demonstrated they wanted to work for me that much you'd bet I'd hire them.
edit 2: I was also told later that numerous applicants struggled with this take home assignment despite it being literal CS 101 level stuff. That's why getting a sense of it someone can code is so important.
When you commit your time and set actual deadlines (such as 1 hour), they don't think they need to write a multi-elevator system with floor input outside the elevator and account for load and time of day or write it in 8 languages and write a 10 page report on the whole thing. They just spend an hour with me and we go through the problem and see how far we get.
You could be spamming that question out to hundreds applicants for all I know. Show you care and spend the time with me. I get several interview requests per day, I'm not wasting my time unless I think a company respects me. I'm in a nice position where I don't need to show I can be exploited by doing a ton of unpaid overtime work.
