Interesting. I think we're getting into the implementation of take homes. My proposal is (1) that a take home technical challenge entirely replace any in-person spontaneous white board drills, and (2) that it only be issued to candidates who you're prepared to bring on-site or otherwise schedule to meet the team if they present you a working solution. I'm not advocating for them to be used as a low-pass filter and spammed to all candidates without some mutual engagement first. The expectation of the onsite is that everyone has reviewed your solution and people can discuss why you made certain decisions or how the introduction of new requirements might impact the design. Or you can talk about why you hate kubernetes or the mini pineboard cluster you built.
I disagree that the goal of an interview experience should be to necessarily give the candidate a new portfolio accomplishment. It's cool if it works out that way, for sure, but that can't be the expectation. I'm mostly interested in incrementally improving the status quo which also isn't focused around an interview day that bolsters your portfolio as an engineer.
I will say my favorite and most memorable interview experience was a phone screen followed by a take home to implement bottles and kegs (a fizz-buzz game) in javascript, a language I was/am not proficient in. Come onsite day, we worked though a ux design problem and a database design problem, we pair debugged some ruby code, and then we wrote a multiplayer back-end for my fizz-buzz client, something I'd also never done before. It definitely ticked the "add something to your portfolio" box but also wasn't stressful in the same way flash 1-hr whiteboard sessions are because I was bringing something to the table that we expanded on during the day-long session.
I disagree that the goal of an interview experience should be to necessarily give the candidate a new portfolio accomplishment. It's cool if it works out that way, for sure, but that can't be the expectation. I'm mostly interested in incrementally improving the status quo which also isn't focused around an interview day that bolsters your portfolio as an engineer.
I will say my favorite and most memorable interview experience was a phone screen followed by a take home to implement bottles and kegs (a fizz-buzz game) in javascript, a language I was/am not proficient in. Come onsite day, we worked though a ux design problem and a database design problem, we pair debugged some ruby code, and then we wrote a multiplayer back-end for my fizz-buzz client, something I'd also never done before. It definitely ticked the "add something to your portfolio" box but also wasn't stressful in the same way flash 1-hr whiteboard sessions are because I was bringing something to the table that we expanded on during the day-long session.