On a related note, when hiring, I often get candidates describe themselves as very motivated, love learning new things, give out their 100% on every task, etc.. Most of them never bother to finish and reply on a simple coding task I send as an initial screening.
So yeah, filler BS goes both ways.
(PS. Coding tasks in prescreening are contentunous topic. My
POV: if you don't have open source "portfolio" I can look at, and if you can't be bothered to spend an hour to potentially save both of us from a couple hours on an interview day, I don't want to talk to you anyway).
Some people do take the piss a little with their coding task requests, but an hour isn't too bad. I do appreciate when someone is willing to look at code I've written beforehand, though - at the end of the day, even if you're being quite focused with your job hunt, if every application took an hour it'd really limit how many you could do.
If the coding task wouldn't take longer than a preliminary interview, I can't see what's controversial about it? If you want to make sure, that no poor slob is putting in days, just make it a timed task. I.e. hand in whatever you have an hour after you've got the problem.
I can see that being asked to code for days is a no-no for prescreening.
When I was looking for my last job I rejected a company based on the simplicity of it's code task. A company's code task should interest and challenge. View helpers satisfy neither requirement (for me).
I disagree, and cite fizzbuzz. There are so many programming candidates who can't even answer a simple problem like fizzbuzz that it prunes out a good number of candidates by asking a simple question like that. Not every step in an interview is intended to meet the same goals, e.g. your coding question could have easily been a quick pruning method versus saying anything about what sort of work is being done there.
So yeah, filler BS goes both ways.
(PS. Coding tasks in prescreening are contentunous topic. My POV: if you don't have open source "portfolio" I can look at, and if you can't be bothered to spend an hour to potentially save both of us from a couple hours on an interview day, I don't want to talk to you anyway).