We had three work-sample exercises at Matasano. All told, they took candidates mid-single-digit hours to finish (many geeked out, or golfed on them; we did our best to keep this from happening --- you can read about this on our hiring page:
This sounds onerous, but it is less onerous than the normal dev hiring process, which involves an onsite interview that eats the whole day. We did on-site interviews, but they took just 2.5 hours to complete; candidates would be out at lunch. Essentially, we were shifting some of the time candidates would spend sweating in a conference room to their couch instead.
There are bad work-sample tests. "Bad" comes in a variety of flavors. I think bad work sample tests will out-predict the median interview. But there's a lot of room to optimize and improve this process, sure.
My concern here is that it seems to signal a lack of respect for the candidate if the company expects them to complete a task with no matching employee time. Interviews are even; both sides clearly have skin in the game; a work-sample test could be given to any number of people at basically no cost.
This is somewhat alleviated by the knowledge that you do a phone screen with each person prior to that stage, but it still leaves me with something of a bad feeling.
We actually pre-pay on that. Candidates get an initial call with a very senior person to start. That call includes coaching on how to get through our interview process, and concludes with us sending free educational material (books, etc.). This coaching and material is not specific to getting a job at Matasano, you can just as easily use it to get a job at one of our competitors. We invest hundreds of dollars in each candidate before we ask them to do our challenges.
It totally depends on the work sample they ask you to do. If no thought went into it then you are correct. If, however, a company devises an interesting project to work on it show they also put some energy into this.
Most importantly though I like programming, but I don't like speaking up in front of a group of strangers, so 6 hours of programming is much more enjoyable to me then even just 1 hour of interviewing.
Interviews aren't even. How many hiring discussions on various parts of the internet have talked about putting tens of hours into studying for the "undergrad CS pop quiz" interview in vogue at so many companies? How many of those same discussions have talked about how hiring is a "distraction" from the "real jobs" of the engineers involved at the company?
The process is already badly asymmetric in addition to being artificial. At least the work sample ideal addresses one of those.
http://www.matasano.com/careers
This sounds onerous, but it is less onerous than the normal dev hiring process, which involves an onsite interview that eats the whole day. We did on-site interviews, but they took just 2.5 hours to complete; candidates would be out at lunch. Essentially, we were shifting some of the time candidates would spend sweating in a conference room to their couch instead.
There are bad work-sample tests. "Bad" comes in a variety of flavors. I think bad work sample tests will out-predict the median interview. But there's a lot of room to optimize and improve this process, sure.