Coding tests. I hate them. On any timed test, I completely lock up and forget everything I know. I'm amazed I've gone 26 years in my career without being fired for not taking tests well. Because, as we all know, that's the core task of every single job. Taking timed tests and shit.

You locked up due to anxiety. They tested your ability to handle anxiety and ship code with a 45 minute deadline. None of which are actual pressures you’ll encounter in an actual software engineering job....

@TeachMeCode your sure of that ;)

While not to be preferred I have had similar emergencies where we did emergency patching within the hour.

@Voxera It happens. Just not as often as these coding tests seem to imply.

@stackodev and thank god for that :)

They still suck, but I’d rather do a quick coding test on the interview than ever deal with another take home assignment.

Which is the fastest way to get rid of me as a candidate.

@ComputerToucher I prefer the take home assignment because it’s not timed and I can use Google. Just like every programmer every day on every real job.

Coding or otherwise actually-relevant-to-your-job tests are a thing but chair-safety training quizzes are a whole other level of unnecessary bullshit. I say chair safety but apply it to any other stupid insurance-mandated time wasters.
More than once a week... and with ridiculous quizzes.
Hope you have managed to avoid it for most of your career.

@stackodev I’ve googled things on interview tests before, it’s not like this is an unchangeable law of “how it’s done”. If they want a 15m pair coding exercise, but forbid the use of a quick Google to sanity check syntax or structure, then it’s not very representative of the every day developer experience either, is it?

Aside from the aspect of “I have other things to do than spec-work” of take homes, I dislike the imbalance of the company getting to evaluate and scrutinize your technical chops based on turned in work but you don’t get to evaluate that of the people you’re going to maybe possibly work with if hired.

That’s my main reason for preferring in situ pair coding exercises over take homes if I absolutely had to make a choice of the two.