Refactoring Back End Engineering Hiring at Slack

When it comes to hiring backend engineers, we’ve always given a take-home exercise, preferring that candidates complete their programming practicum in an environment cozier to them: on their own machine, and in their own time, within reason. Though we as engineers were heavily involved in the pilot process for the new code review exercise, in order to scale it to all of engineering recruiting, we also needed to ensure that the exercise could be sent to new candidates and completed with minimal intervention needed by an engineer. This approach had a number of issues:
creating and sending docs to candidates was a tedious, manual process
tweaking the code content of the exercise required manually updating the template doc
all the comments contained the name of the writer, removing anonymity
the tooling was unintuitive for code review

With that in mind, we decided to move the exercise to GitHub.

Source: slack.engineering