Take-home coding assignments are a common but flawed part of the engineering hiring process. They consume candidates' personal time, disadvantage people with caregiving responsibilities or multiple jobs, often lack relevance to actual day-to-day work, and send the wrong signal about what engineering roles require. With AI making raw code a cheap commodity, these tests are even less useful for assessing technical depth. Some value remains in using them as conversation starters or assessing breadth of engineering thinking. Better alternatives include live-coding sessions, in-depth technical conversations covering topics like accessibility, performance, and security, technical showcases where candidates present their own work, and collaborative code reviews of a standardized pull request. Each alternative is evaluated with pros and cons. The overall recommendation is for hiring managers to drop take-home tests and shift focus toward communication, collaboration, and holistic engineering judgment.
Table of contents
Overview §What’s wrong with them? §What are they good for? §What are the alternatives? §Wrapping up §Sort: