I recently took an online assessment for a 6 month contract software position. This was probably the creepiest experience I have had with any online assessment.
The assessment required that your camera was used to watch you, you also had to share your screen and recorded all your keyboard strokes and mouse clicks.
The technology would watch your eyes and if it saw you look somewhere else, supposedly on another screen, it would dock you.
What an invasion of privacy!
The questions
The questions were multiple choice on outdated JavaScript, pre ES5, ES6, asking about esoteric features nobody uses.
Some multiple choice problems would show you code with blanks and a dropdown to fill in the blanks.
There was no coding section like hacker rank or leet code. It was all multiple choice.
The only thing this assessment proved is if you had a good memory. It did nothing to prove you were a problem solver or a creative programmer.
This assessment assesses nothing valuable
The most important thing about programming is how you solve problems, refactor your work and communicate solutions. This can only be done with a code challenge.
Code challenges are expensive evaluations and firms that use the big brother approach are cheap and should be avoided. On the other hand if a firm asks you to do a code challenge they are giving you a chance to show what you can do. It is a sign of respect. It also takes resources on their end to evaluate what you have done.
Be careful if the code challenge is suspicious and appears to be doing work free for the prospective employer. Fortunately none of my code challenges where like that.
I firmly believe the best coders will research the best solutions to a particular problem. They will consult fellow devs and search the internet for solutions. They will tap into resources like MDN to make sure they are using all the latest features of JavaScript correctly.
They will find solutions on stack overflow and github and reverse engineer them into what is appropriate.
They will properly name functions, and variables and create classes as needed and refactor the code a couple of times before submitting the solution.
This is the dev I would like to hire.
In the future I will decline the creepy assessments and I think you should too.