Live coding sessions don't reflect realistic work conditions, only allow for the evaluation of relatively short code snippets, and can be affected by candidates' emotional response during the interview. Take-home assignments, on the other hand, are substantially time-consuming for both candidates and interviewers, slows down the interview process and lead to candidates abandoning the process.

Instead, code review assignments offer a better approach in most cases. They evaluate candidates' performance in a realistic work environment, save time for both parties, allow for deeper and more objective evaluation, and resist AI language models.

Despite their advantages, code review assignments are less commonly used in interviews than live coding and coding assignments. This talk advocates for their more frequent use in the evaluation of software engineering candidates and discusses insights gained from using code review assignments to evaluate candidates for software engineering roles at Fastly.