I've been on both sides of the table and I'll tell you a coding challenge is a much better solution than the whiteboard/leetcode/code-on-the-fly during the interview. Just keep it short i.e. 2-4 hours max.
As far as alternatives to a coding challenge, the OP did suggest walking through a prior project on GitHub. I think that's a great idea (in addition to a coding challenge though); an open source project on GitHub is a bonus for a candidate, and will in many cases steer the interviewer to ask questions about your project in lieu of abstract concepts.
I hate to remind everyone but PC culture is here to stay. We can all complain about but the fact is no one has a solution, except for staying off social media (which I generally have been doing, and I've never been happier).
Two years ago someone I know was laid off. After a three-month climb to find a new job, they vowed to put together an emergency fund. After a sudden drop in rates, they took out a small cash-out refinance. Luckily they still have a job, but the fact that they now have that cushion puts their mind at ease.
Lesson learned: take advantage of cheap credit while you can.
They got cash while it was easy and certain. Accumulating it slowly would be as uncertain as their employment and expenses, and the option of borrowing later when they really need it may not be available. I can see how it might have been a logical choice for them.
Just go to any paint store and you'll find yourself halfway there. When we were searching for gray tones we were stunned at the creative names we saw for the thousands of grays available i.e. "mindful gray" "blissful stone" etc.
That's got a be a dream job for some uber-creative artist.
I figured it was only a matter of time before all the WFH "advice" articles would start. This guys's been doing it for 2 weeks and he's already an expert dispensing advice. I've been WFH for 8 years, so reading this is a bunch of LOL.
Regarding headphones, this is not an issue once you move into a dedicated office space in your house. One thing I use to hate is taking headphones on/off every time there's a call. Regarding set hours, that's totally a preference. I work late at night sometimes because I feel like it. WFH means flexibility and not commuting means sometimes I get a jolt of inspiration to work off hours. I don't mind because the trade-off is I get to take time off during the day to attend school events for my kids.
Remote work is a lifestyle change for sure. More loneliness, more discipline, less water-cooler gossip. It requires the right mindset and personality that some of you don't have, and I'm sure you're itching to get back to the office.
I've been working remote for 8 years and so my commute is 0 mins. But in my experience companies that allow remote work have caught on to this commute time==money dynamic and have adjusted their offered compensation accordingly. More than once have I had or heard the conversation that "well, you have the perk of no commute + living in a lower cost area, so based on that the compensation target for you is X - Y", where Y is $10-20k less.
The question I wrestle with: is it fair?
1. For living in a lower cost area, no. If I live in SF I benefit/pay a premium for living in a nicer area. That should have nothing to do with compensation (unless they are located in SF and need me close by).
2. For not having a commute, maybe. I think it is fair for a company to pay a premium to have someone onsite. But that premium should be the same whether I walk 5 mins to work or drive 50 miles.
I think it's a mistake to frame this with respect to 'fairness'.
If you were another company instead of an individual you would not be having this discussion with your employer.
Would they try to bring the price of IT equipment down, with the argument of a shorter delivery route, if they were doing business with a retail business close by their office?
For HR the best outcome is to get the best people possible for the lowest price possible.
The best outcome for you as an employee is to get the maximum compensation + benefits + bonuses for the least amount of your time/effort.
For the archetype factory employee, their value grows linearly with time spent working. For a knowledge worker the output of a small team of 10/20 people could generate orders of magnitude more, the time spent is not relevant what matters is the value adding output.
So if you want to think in terms of fairness don't frame it in terms of the 40 hours a week, frame it in terms of the profit generated or money saved as a direct result of your output.
> frame it in terms of the profit generated or money saved as a direct result of your output.
As I pointed out here[1] this is hard to do and no company does this. If you can find a way to quantify your value to the company, that's great. 90+% of the cases I've seen where people do it, they're making wild assumptions that no employer would buy, though.
> Would they try to bring the price of IT equipment down, with the argument of a shorter delivery route, if they were doing business with a retail business close by their office?
No, but they would bring the price down if they could buy it cheaper from a competitor. If you live in a low COL area, they could try to argue that they can find other employees in your area for whom they could pay less than what you demand, and those people would still get paid more than the average in that area.
There's a reason outsourced employees in other countries don't get paid as much as they do in the US. Do not expect that you can change that dynamic easily.
Of course, if you can demonstrate that it'll be hard for them to find a remote worker with your (perhaps rare) skills, then your argument would be more appealing to them.
Why should employers pay for that? It's the employee's choice where they live, not the company's. If the company bought some company housing and had employees live there, then your idea would make sense. But why should someone who chooses to live 2 hours away get paid more than someone who lives 5 minutes away?
However, I think there are some good arguments to be made about where the employers choose to locate their offices.
The problem probably lies somewhere between afraid of getting sued and not wanting to shake the medical groupthink apple cart.
Last year I was suffering through a bout of strange fatigue that came about right after a mysterious throat infection. There were days I could barely go up the stairs without being winded or without assistance. I googled around and started reading about Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) and found this large, shadow community of millions of sufferers. Many of these people have had these symptoms for years, and when they go to the doctor they are simply told "It's all in your head," and if lucky, they'll run some tests and prescribe something that gives them temporary relief.
I asked my cousin who is a doctor about his opinion on CFS, and he told me it was difficult to diagnose and even harder to treat. The most they will do is refer you to a specialist or even psychiatrist.
After a couple months my fatigue went away on its own. But I did find that creatine helped. And this has been backed by others in the CFS community who have stated that eating raw meat relieves their symptoms (natural creatine in meat is destroyed once cooked). But a doctor would never tell me that, because if there isn't conclusive proof from a medical journal and/or a big pharma drug to prescribe, they are either too afraid or unwilling to say anything.
While the war on drugs is in its waning days, there is a (aging) segment on the right that worships law enforcement and is generally in support of more laws and heavy-handed police tactics.
I think the OP is calling some these people out as hypocrites who demand "touch on crime" policies that disproportionally affect poorer communities, while they themselves break laws.
That aside, I find the hypocrisy elsewhere, namely the people who want small government but who want everyone to pay billions for mass incarceration (and raise taxes for more police) as a result of these policies.
The whole "false positives" narrative is an example of the "saying something enough makes it true" fallacy.
I've interviewed dozens of people, and you can easily root out false positives by asking about their prior experience. Simply probing about things like design patterns to challenges with Javacript front-end coding is enough. If the candidate can go into explicit detail about past projects including bugs they fixed and limitations they came across in a Angular 6 project (as an example), then that's usually a good sign they know what they're talking about.
As far as alternatives to a coding challenge, the OP did suggest walking through a prior project on GitHub. I think that's a great idea (in addition to a coding challenge though); an open source project on GitHub is a bonus for a candidate, and will in many cases steer the interviewer to ask questions about your project in lieu of abstract concepts.