The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework

Nope. You can kiss that garbage goodbye. I don't need your job bad enough to jump through those kind of hoops. Not even if you paid me to do it - I have a life, and I don't have time to do this on the side. And to use vacation days to do this... no. Just no.

This kind of "interviewing" is going to attract only those who are desperate enough to be willing to subject themselves to this abuse. That's not the top talent, and it never will be.

If you're looking for employees willing to be exploited, though, I suppose it might make sense...

I like the idea of doing a code review with someone, and talking through an actual problem, as described in the article.

I've done the whiteboarding, and that was exhausting. I've done programming exercises where I wrote code to some spec, then talked it through with my interviewer; that was a little better.

My first job in 2008 involved about a 15-minute coding exercise, and talking to half a dozen people for about 15 minutes each, mostly just having conversations. That was a relatively nice interview, and a good team to work with for a number of years.