Doesn't that tell you that the method of hiring is flawed in the first place?
If you care to weed out bad candiates, what help are 100% perfectly fine take-home exercises? The only thing that tells you is, that all of your candidates are viable in the first place. Just go into an interview with THAT assumption and ask the right questions.
Why do so many companies assume that people who try to get hired for a certain job don't meet the basic requirements? That gotta be the rule not the exception? That's just a bad faith assumption.
Just make sure your hire fits into your culture and give them sufficient probation time to grow into your codebase.
Unless you are looking for a "senior developer with x years of experience". I have a live, hobbies and family. I don't care to spend most of my free time fixing code in some obscure library I'm not ever going to use only to stand a chance to get a different job in the future.
How in the world did current developers EVER get ANY job? Who gives developers the chance to grow these days?
It's a "foot in" problem, I feel. Shit companies have shit interviews and give out shit workloads to MAYBE get a foot in the door.
You can follow along or be proactive, for instance start a new github account just for interviews, do code wars challenges, write a blog and just link your writeups, github and blog to applications. Along with your CV with major projects etc. of course.
Most people I know who work at big firms got calls from friends or friends of friends to interviews, so spending time socializing the local hacker circles is probably going to be worthwhile as well.
If you have life, hobbies and family, you should still be able to schedule 1-4 hours a week to job hunting, much more if you don't have a job of course.
It's not pretty or much fun, but it's certainly doable.
The problem is not toxisity itself. That's but a symptom. It's:
1. People getting into positions for the wrong reasons (diversity hires),
2. No one has any kind of backbone any more... victim culture and molycoddling shows it's ugly face,
3. Real smart people that don't' want to content with stupid getting rightfully angry with their subpar collegues who are desperatly trying to being somewhat relevant.
Let's face it... scientists are most of the time not people persons. Most smart people don't care for your snowflake persona getting hurt by the truth. It's basically impossible to do antying in an environment that treats microaggressions as anything else but the completely infantile bullshit that they are.
GROW A FUCKING SPINE AND GROW THE FUCK UP WHINERS.
If you care to weed out bad candiates, what help are 100% perfectly fine take-home exercises? The only thing that tells you is, that all of your candidates are viable in the first place. Just go into an interview with THAT assumption and ask the right questions.
Why do so many companies assume that people who try to get hired for a certain job don't meet the basic requirements? That gotta be the rule not the exception? That's just a bad faith assumption.
Just make sure your hire fits into your culture and give them sufficient probation time to grow into your codebase.