I like the idea of giving candidates a choice. For me personally, I would almost always take the "homework" if it meant no (or very short) in person interview. I like to code, not interview. Still, 6-7 hours is pushing it, it should be a few hours (3 or 4 at max, if you're not going to do a face to face), and a genuinely interesting problem (the kind of problem can tell you a lot about the company itself!).
When I interviewed at Apple years ago, they gave me a take home program to solve. It was interesting and I enjoyed it a lot. It required some good algo knowledge and had to be written in C. I was told in my face to face that few people ever solve it, and I enjoyed discussing it.
But the rest of the interview was unpleasant - your typical SV brain teaser riddled, algo whiteboard sessions for 4 hours, 2 days in a row. I wasn't really expecting it and wasn't prepared (my fault), so failed miserably. I think I suffered PTSD after that for a while :).
Now I feel preparing for that sort of interview is a huge waste of my own time. It has so little relevance to reality. I'd much rather put that time into building a product or learning some new PL or whatever. At least with a coding test I'm honing skills that I'll use day to day.
Homework can't replace an interview, unless you're willing to hire people who can code without any idea if they will fit in with the team or be able to work with others.
That sounds intuitively reasonable, but does an interview actually have significant accuracy in filtering out people who will do badly on those criteria? As far as I know, such data as is available says human intuition is completely wrong about this and an interview is not significantly more accurate than flipping a coin.
When I interviewed at Apple years ago, they gave me a take home program to solve. It was interesting and I enjoyed it a lot. It required some good algo knowledge and had to be written in C. I was told in my face to face that few people ever solve it, and I enjoyed discussing it.
But the rest of the interview was unpleasant - your typical SV brain teaser riddled, algo whiteboard sessions for 4 hours, 2 days in a row. I wasn't really expecting it and wasn't prepared (my fault), so failed miserably. I think I suffered PTSD after that for a while :).
Now I feel preparing for that sort of interview is a huge waste of my own time. It has so little relevance to reality. I'd much rather put that time into building a product or learning some new PL or whatever. At least with a coding test I'm honing skills that I'll use day to day.