I would much rather do a take home test, and as someone who has done hiring, I would much rather give a take home test.
The problem though I have with code challenges, is when you get rejected, and they offer ZERO reason why they rejected your code, despite the fact you may have spent a whole fucking week working on it, doing the best you could. I have outright asked why my code was rejected, and I have NEVER gotten a response. Pure bullshit.
The other problem, is that most of the time they tell you not to use external libraries, which I get why, if they want to access your algorithms or data structure skills, but this is stupid, because you likely shouldn't rewrite libraries that do a better job than what you can code in a short time, and in any real world scenario, i would use all the libraries I could to write less code. Its better to test those things via white board. In some cases, I would reject you based on you not knowing about standard libraries.
I had one take home test, that was basically, write a database like thing in ruby to process and query an input file with dates, names, etc, you can't use any gems. If I used external gems, I could finish the assignment in few lines of code, without external gems, i have to do all this bullshit i would never do in a real world scenario.
The problem though I have with code challenges, is when you get rejected, and they offer ZERO reason why they rejected your code, despite the fact you may have spent a whole fucking week working on it, doing the best you could. I have outright asked why my code was rejected, and I have NEVER gotten a response. Pure bullshit.
The other problem, is that most of the time they tell you not to use external libraries, which I get why, if they want to access your algorithms or data structure skills, but this is stupid, because you likely shouldn't rewrite libraries that do a better job than what you can code in a short time, and in any real world scenario, i would use all the libraries I could to write less code. Its better to test those things via white board. In some cases, I would reject you based on you not knowing about standard libraries.
I had one take home test, that was basically, write a database like thing in ruby to process and query an input file with dates, names, etc, you can't use any gems. If I used external gems, I could finish the assignment in few lines of code, without external gems, i have to do all this bullshit i would never do in a real world scenario.