I often see complaints on HN about the silliness of whiteboarding in programming interviews, would you whiteboarding to a take-home assignment? Are there constraints you would prefer on one or the other? What amount of time spent qualifying for a single job is too much?
I personally pushed to make our interview process more centered around a take-home style assignment, as I feel it's a much better approximation of programming skills than an in-person, high stress whiteboarding session, or a quiz on some programming trivia. We try to keep the assignment tightly constrained ("Here's a broken app with x requirements. Fix it.") in order to keep it to a few hours max.
This I feel has been tremendously helpful for us, as I've never seen someone pass the take-home assignment and subsequently do poorly in the technical portion of our interview. Previously we had many people scrub out of our (admittedly pretty easy) technical interviews. Obviously asking for the take-home has resulted in a few false negatives, but I'd much rather an overly strong pre-interview filter to wasting hours of my entire team's time on a crappy interview.
I personally pushed to make our interview process more centered around a take-home style assignment, as I feel it's a much better approximation of programming skills than an in-person, high stress whiteboarding session, or a quiz on some programming trivia. We try to keep the assignment tightly constrained ("Here's a broken app with x requirements. Fix it.") in order to keep it to a few hours max.
This I feel has been tremendously helpful for us, as I've never seen someone pass the take-home assignment and subsequently do poorly in the technical portion of our interview. Previously we had many people scrub out of our (admittedly pretty easy) technical interviews. Obviously asking for the take-home has resulted in a few false negatives, but I'd much rather an overly strong pre-interview filter to wasting hours of my entire team's time on a crappy interview.