[arclyte]

You make some good points about only actually interviewing competent developers and not wasting anyone's time. But in my experience, the take home assignments or coding challenges can often take hours to complete if they are to weed out copy-pasta or dumb luck. For example - "Create a basic CRUD app, with testing, in a configured environment" or some such takes time for me to set up, write, test, and package for delivery.

For me as an interviewee, to have to devote hours of my time doing work for free just to prove that I know how to code, all based on a short phone call, is just as crazy. How do I know your company is one I want to work for? How do I know you're offering the salary and benefits I need? We haven't gotten to that part of the conversation yet and I'm already putting in real hours of work - especially if I have multiple interviewers that ask me to complete code challenges.

It's a catch-22 really. If you have no hurdles, you hire people who don't know what they're doing. If you put too many hurdles, you scare off the folks who don't want to waste hours of their time proving they know the basics. For an interviewer, it's best to get this stuff right up front so you can more effectively screen, but for the interviewee it'd be best that this comes at the end of the process when they know they actually want the job.

All in all, I think this works better for junior level positions because that's where you want to know where folks are at, but hiring senior level people with years of experience, it just gets insulting to have to jump through hoops at every single interview. Of course, I'm a bit burnt out on interviews at the moment, so take that for what it's worth ;)