A perspective from the other side of the desk (playing devil's advocate here):
There's a fundamental skill that a good programmer has to have, and that is to be able to take a novel problem that they haven't seen before and break it down to solve it in a sensible way.
There are plenty of programmers who fake their way through a career without having that skill. They just copy stuff and never really understand it. They're fine for some types of programming career, but if your business involves solving new and novel problems then you have to know which type of programmer you're hiring.
A contrived live coding exercise gives you a strong signal on this. It does have a decent chance of producing a false negative, but only a very small chance of a false positive, and that's the trade that has to be made with this kind of approach.
Is a better option to not do this kind of assessment, hire the person, find out that they can't do the hard bits and then fire them within 6 months? I'll take some convincing of that...
There's a fundamental skill that a good programmer has to have, and that is to be able to take a novel problem that they haven't seen before and break it down to solve it in a sensible way.
There are plenty of programmers who fake their way through a career without having that skill. They just copy stuff and never really understand it. They're fine for some types of programming career, but if your business involves solving new and novel problems then you have to know which type of programmer you're hiring.
A contrived live coding exercise gives you a strong signal on this. It does have a decent chance of producing a false negative, but only a very small chance of a false positive, and that's the trade that has to be made with this kind of approach.
Is a better option to not do this kind of assessment, hire the person, find out that they can't do the hard bits and then fire them within 6 months? I'll take some convincing of that...