
Show HN: Candidate Code – take home coding test management - mjfisher
https://candidatecode.com/
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mjfisher
I've found well-designed take home coding tests to be a great way of assessing
potential hires during a recruitment process. I've also found that take home
tests can be really hard to manage for a growing team; lost emails from HR are
common, incomplete submissions are returned ad-hoc via zipped attachments and
google drive uploads, and reviews and feedback from your own engineers are
often difficult to keep track of.

I created Candidate Code to make it trivially simple to issue your existing
take home coding tests through Git, collect the results and review them
collaboratively. Feedback is welcome.

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mjfisher
Also, because take home tests can be a controversial subject: I think they're
a great way to evaluate some skills, but they're not the only way. There's
pros and cons to every technique, for both candidates and the hiring
organization. I'm personally also a big fan of pairing style interview
questions (remote or otherwise). A lot of the bad experiences people have with
take home coding challenges seem to be caused by poor design as much as
anything else.

Mostly, I think if you design your hiring process to respect your candidates
it's difficult to go too far wrong.

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longcommonname
I refuse take home tests, we need better ways of triaging talent not better
ways of wasting my time.

~~~
mjfisher
I see this position fairly frequently. While I respect the place it comes
from, I've never quite understood the unequivocal nature of it. Is it all take
home tests you refuse?

Does your position change at all depending on the length of the take home, or
how much effort has been put into designing the test? Or the trust you have in
the company?

Personally, I'd rather do a short and focused take-home if it means I can save
time on a longer in-person interview setting. It can be a really efficient way
of demonstrating a set of skills, which leaves in-person interviews free to
discuss higher impact topics like architecture, decision making and soft
skills.

