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But what if the ops engineer can pass the coding challenge? He maybe trying to change roles.

Or the dev that only knows pascal - if they can pass the challenge using pascal then I'd think they could easily learn whatever coding language your team uses. Learning a language is easier than learning coding.

That's what I like about coding, and about these blind challenges - it's purely skill based. If they want to apply and can pass the test, they they're worth talking to. If the wrong people are applying (and passing) then your job description and challenge are wrong and need to be calibrated.

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It is possible that someone with little dev experience could complete our challenge. We were mostly trying to avoid wasting time: theirs to complete the challenge and ours to review it, if we thought it was extremely unlikely they’d complete it.

However, when I referenced the hypothetical ops guy, I was referring more to a misalignment of goals: someone looking for a job where they’d be doing more devops stuff vs our need for a dedicated developer.

Regarding the hypothetical pascal developer, it really depends on your need. I’ve been in the position to hire bright people who can learn our tool set on the job, and that’s great. I’ve also been in the position where we can’t afford a month or two while a new dev learns our language an framework before they become productive. When in the latter position, it makes sense to weed people you’re not interested in out early.

I would love it if a well-written job description would prevent unqualified people from applying, but my experience has been that it just doesn’t. That’s why some people use fizz buzz (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/02/why-cant-programmer...). That’s why we used a short phone screen.

> However, when I referenced the hypothetical ops guy, I was referring more to a misalignment of goals: someone looking for a job where they’d be doing more devops stuff vs our need for a dedicated developer.

If someone were looking for a devops-oriented job, why would they be applying for your non-devops-oriented position?

Do you think it's a bad idea to have a high-level conversation between the company and the prospective employee before assigning a take-home test?

That depends on the attitude you go into the conversation with and whether your take-home test can be automatically scored well enough for a coarse filter to reject the people who obviously cannot do it. It also depends on how many applicants you have. Spending half an hour per candidate gets onerous when you have hundreds, so cutting to the chase in a semi-automated way may be a better means of whittling the pile down than having a recruiter, founder, or hiring manager filter it based on conscious or unconscious biases.

I was highlighting that line because I think it indicates a subtle bias towards people based on background and assumes people are not making reasoned decisions about what they are applying to. I understand that there are tons of unqualified resume blasters out there, but I figure nearly all of them will either ignore the take-home or submit such schlock that it will be easy to automatically reject them.