In Defence of the Technical Interview

I’ve heard of firms that ask candidates to actually write full blown, real world programs outside of interview time. Beyond the obvious copyright issues if you don’t get an assignment from the candidate, there’s no good way to make this process repeatable, no way to ensure the question always fits the available time, and no way to ensure you see a good range of programming skills (e.g. the feature may simply involve copy/pasting some existing code with minor tweaks). Companies do code testing because they have encountered so many candidates who look good on paper, and may even be able to talk about computers convincingly, but can’t actually write a program when asked.

Source: blog.plan99.net