David Heinemeier Hansson joins the discussion on evaluating programmers with a skills test. At Basecamp, they prefer a late stage take-home challenge that mirrors the actual work that will be performed in the job if hired. As usual from Basecamp, this is very well thought through and sounds like a nice process for the company and the candidate alike:

There’s no perfect process for hiring great programmers, but there are plenty of terrible ways to screw it up. We’ve rejected the industry stables of grilling candidates in front of a whiteboard or needling them with brain teasers since the start at Basecamp. But you’re not getting around showing real code when applying for a job here.

So we whittle the group of candidates down aggressively first. This means judging their cover letter and, to a far lesser extent, their resume. For the opening we had on the Research & Fidelity team, we gave 40 people the take-home test, and even that proved to be too many. For the opening we had on the Security, Infrastructure & Performance team, we only gave 13 people the take-home test. That felt better. In the future, we’ll target fewer than 20 for sure.

Then there’s the assessment itself. I’ve heard many fair complaints that companies are asking candidates to complete massive projects that may take 20-30-40 hours of work, which is all unpaid, and which might be difficult for candidates to fit in with their existing job and life. Yeah, don’t do that. Asking someone for forty hours of work product, without pay, which might well go nowhere, is not what we do or advocate at Basecamp.