What can replace the take-home assignment?
Short answer
Read work the candidate already did. A take-home now measures how well someone prompts a model over a weekend, and it costs a candidate unpaid hours you cannot compensate at volume. A dated record of real decisions gives you a longer, harder-to-fake read, and takes you about five minutes.
How it works
Cost to them
Unpaid hours, per company, per application.
the strongest candidates decline first
↓
Cost to you
Someone has to design it, and someone has to grade it.
and grading drifts between reviewers
↓
What it measures now
Weekend prompting, mostly.
the thing it was built to rule out
↓
Instead
Read weeks of real decisions they already wrote down.
five minutes, nothing to grade
Set a new task→Read the real ones
On Proof today
4,100+
logs written
900+
engineers writing them
Counted live, and excluding one account that flooded the platform with automated rows in July–August 2026. Every public number on Proof excludes it.
What this does not do
For some roles a scoped paid trial is still the right call. The argument here is against the unpaid weekend exercise, not against ever seeing someone work.
Has this actually worked for anyone? One hire, every step, with the denominator — including what it does not prove.
Related questions
Published
September 2026
Made by
Radhakrishnan Selvaraj
Candor and Innovation
PROOF.ZEROMAINTENANCEENGINEER.IN