OGS (https://online-go.com/) is pretty good as well. It's web based and supports both correspondence and real time games. It's also pretty close to KGS in terms of features.
I've recently had a very similar experience with work sample/coding tests and I completely agree. It strikes me that most people setting these tasks are pretty clueless about how difficult the task is and haven't tested them out on non-candidates.
How they're implemented has varied wildly between companies, but most of them were used as an initial screener rather than a major deciding factor, despite being one of the most time consuming parts of the process for the candidate.
Like you I was able to go through with most of them, but I felt like they were a massive waste of my free time and companies were often very slow to follow up in it. I think a lot of the time it just isn't worth jumping through these hoops for a company I don't know anything about.
My best test I took was around an hour and involved building a really basic CRUD app in Django as part of a larger face to face interview, followed by a short discussion. It worked well because they set up an environment for me, the data model was fixed, and there was a list of short requirements I could complete in order, so I was able to just dive into the work, and spend time on the kind of things that were relevant.
Another one basically asked me to take a large dataset, build a web application around it, and deploy it, which would probably have taken me a week to complete but "should" have taken around 3 hours. They tried to present it a really interesting problem I would enjoy working on and then asked me to keep all my work confidential.
Most of the tests I've done are still closer to general problem solving/comp sci tests, which is still pretty far removed from the actual work, but at least they're not a huge time sink when implemented properly.
This. Measuring productivity is useless if you are producing the wrong thing. Even ignoring all the things programmers do other than writing code, this idea still completely ignores the many external factors that interfere with productivity.
Organisations are more than the sum of their parts. It's not like you can take a bunch of 10x programmers from a successful project, put them on a failing project and expect them to just get it done. Why is 10x programmers a thing but not 10x management?
I'm a back end web dev with 5 years experience, focused on Python, Django, and plain SQL. I'm proficient with Javascript, JQuery, AWS, and ansible, and am fairly comfortable with numerical computing (NumPy/Matlab) from a degree in Physics. I enjoy working on useful tools and APIs.
Whether the username is sensitive depends a lot on context. If the service is a dating site, gambling, porn, etc. just disclosing someone is a user of the site breaches their privacy.
What this really highlights is a lack of consistency. If adding a security measure involves some kind of trade-off (UX in this case), you should really understand what you are trying to prevent and consider the rest of the attack surface. I think it would be a fallacy to immediately give up just because a larger vulnerability exists though.
