I'm going to add my thoughts in agreement, mainly because I see the following sentiments fairly commonly:
1. "Coding quizzes" are arbitrary and unfair in a technical interview!
2. Take home projects as part of the interview process are unfair because I've got a busy life!
3. No, I don't have lots of side projects to show because I've been working for the past 15 years and all the IP I've worked on is owned by my current/prior employers.
To add to your harshness, if all those three things above are true, (a) maybe you're not as good a developer as you think you are, and (b) as someone who has done a lot of hiring, I am certainly able to find folks who will (pretty enthusiastically, I'd add) fulfill at least one of those tasks (i.e. in-person coding questions, take home problem, or extensive existing personal projects/open source), even in today's competitive market.
The sentiments you presented there are extremes, just like your own position is the opposite extreme. The reality, as usual, is somewhere in the middle:
1. Even the best designed and well thought-out coding quizzes are not guaranteed to be a good predictor of the candidate's abilities. And that's when we're talking about the best. A great deal of coding quizzes currently in use are things interviewers came up with because they had to come up with something. So I guess the real sentiment is: coding quizzes need to be crafted and used better.
2. If you use take-home projects in your interview process, you'll invariably be filtering out people who value their free time, regardless of their skills. Put yourself in your candidates' shoes. A typical hiring process is already quite involved. Your candidate has to set aside the time for a recruiter chat, phone screen, a meeting with some of your team, etc. And the vast majority of devs don't get any overtime pay. The bottom line is that free time is extremely valuable. If you're asking your candidates to spend a weekend coding a project for free, be prepared for a whole bunch of them to lose interest and go looking somewhere else.
3. Yes, it's quite reasonable that a candidate with 15+ years of experience doesn't have any side projects to show. I've lost count of things I've played and fiddled with, and then abandoned, because they're simply not good enough to publish. Not to mention that your responsibility for your code doesn't end when you publish it. You're expected to maintain it, keep it documented, bug free, etc. A candidate might not have anything to show because they're "not good enough", but they also might be a mature and responsible dev.
I don't doubt that you've done a lot of hiring and that you're able to find candidates to suit your requirements, but don't fool yourself into thinking that there isn't a whole bunch of bias baked into your process. The fact that this bias isn't hurting you right now should make you question whether today's market really is as competitive as you think.
1. "Coding quizzes" are arbitrary and unfair in a technical interview!
2. Take home projects as part of the interview process are unfair because I've got a busy life!
3. No, I don't have lots of side projects to show because I've been working for the past 15 years and all the IP I've worked on is owned by my current/prior employers.
To add to your harshness, if all those three things above are true, (a) maybe you're not as good a developer as you think you are, and (b) as someone who has done a lot of hiring, I am certainly able to find folks who will (pretty enthusiastically, I'd add) fulfill at least one of those tasks (i.e. in-person coding questions, take home problem, or extensive existing personal projects/open source), even in today's competitive market.