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My current company used a "homework assignment" and they bought a lot of my trust with it. 1. The "assignment" took me about 4 hours, which they expected and t

My current company used a "homework assignment" and they bought a lot of my trust with it. 1. The "assignment" took me about 4 hours, which they expected and told me off the bat. 2. It involved mostly relevant code with 1-2 wrinkles that were not odd just not everyday sorts of things. For the proceeding interview, I was able to sit with 3-4 engineers for 1-2 hours really just diving into details about my experience and their processes, etc. So if I could offer advice it would be to find a "homework problem" your existing crew could build independently in 4 hours or so. As in you've actually had more than 1 team member attempt the request, and they did it in about 4 hours each. This was actually an interview process I didn't mind. I have 15-ish years of experience doing development. I can spare half a day for a prospect no problem. It was actually kind of fun. 4 hours seems to be a good "sweet spot". You can ask something sufficiently technical and oriented to the daily work without being a bore. And when the interview comes around, you can make sure it's not some ego-bound contest, more of a conversation.

phamilton 10y ago
Additionally, most of us are more willing to do interview work in our off time. Taking a vacation day to interview is a direct financial investment. Spending a Saturday doing a 4 hour home work is a sacrifice, but doesn't require taking vacation time. Taking an early afternoon off to go talk with 3-4 engineers for 1-2 hours is something that can much more easily fit into ones schedule. EDIT: I want to provide an anecdote around this. If your salary is $150k, it may cost you roughly $400 in gross pay to interview somewhere. Sure, you could take paid vacation, but vacation time is paid out in cash when you leave so it still costs you. Companies with unlimited vacation are a different story.
pmiller2 10y ago
I'd totally go for a 4 hour homework problem, if it got me out of 2-3 hours worth of technical interviews.
- mcbits 10y ago
  I'd rather do 2-3 hours of technical interviews than 2-3 hours of "revive your most traumatic memory and tell me about it."
lbatx 10y ago
At my previous company, I was the hiring manager and gave a homework assignment that was targeted a little shorter than you describe, at right about 2-3 hours. I was clear upfront that it would take about that long, though if you wanted to take longer, you could. Within reason, I didn't hold the time against the person if they took longer. The crazy thing was that over half of the applicants that passed a resume screen and phone interview could not complete the homework assignment. Over half. Some couldn't get it at all (either gave up or had compile errors), some got it to run but it didn't work, a few got it to mostly work but their programs had serious bugs, and the last few actually got it right. The assignment was to read a file containing a list of numbers (some formatted incorrectly, so there was some very simple parsing logic involved), call an API using each correctly formatted number as a parameter, and store what the API returned to a file. I'm still shocked over half of developers couldn't accomplish that task. Makes me wonder what they were accomplishing in their existing roles.
- vinhboy 10y ago
  Thanks for sharing. I think this is a good data point to prove that most people will not cheat on their take home. There is no incentive to cheat. Why would you want a job you are not qualified to do. From your experience, it sounds like these are good tests, because it's screening for qualified candidates, unlike the phone interview.
  - gambogi 10y ago
    > Why would you want a job you are not qualified to do. money.
    - gaius 10y ago
      Also, credentialling. Even if you can't do the work and only stay a few months, Google or Goldman or another big name on your CV will still open many doors.
      - wolfgke 10y ago
mdip 10y ago
Just wanted to say that I really like the idea of testing the "homework assignment" on your own team to hone it. I had a similar experience a month ago. It was a similar "4 hour project" but it was open ended with "make it as complicated or as simple as you want". Being a single table backed CRUD app, you could only put in so many capabilities but it got me excited thinking about ways I could surprise the staff. In the end, I made it self-hosted (in a language that self-hosted is less common), included an installer, and made it support multiple connections from different devices with updates that pushed to the connected clients. The project took me about a day and a half (with two of those hours spent yelling at WIX), but the core parts took about two hours. I was genuinely surprised at how much fun I had putting it together. They also asked me to estimate my time spent -- since I had contract work I was doing at the time and couldn't dedicate a long stretch all at once to it -- I broke it down into its individual tasks and documented the whole thing. They had no problem with the fact that I delivered it a week after the interview. I also second your "I can spare a half a day for a prospect" attitude. There's a flip-side benefit to that, as well. A candidate who feels over burdened with a simple assignment (provided it's tested as you mentioned and truly is simple) is probably not one I'd be interested in hiring, anyway. I'm not saying it's "one size fits all" -- I've had candidates walk in the door that I knew in advance were really good fits who were hired after a 30-minute screen. That, though, is a unicorn sighting.
- hackinthebochs 10y ago
  What if the HW assignment became the norm. Could you spend half a day, or a whole day to 10 jobs? What if after you spend all that time you still don't get any offers, or even interviews? Job searches are already hard enough (for most people) without these huge time sinks becoming the norm.
  - Terr_ 10y ago
    You're assuming that such assignments would always be given improperly-early in the vetting process. If 10 good assignments meant at least 3 offers, it'd be a different story, right?
matwood 10y ago
My current company does something similar. I think back when I had to do it, it took 2-3 hours. It's a pretty basic problem using strategies and observers. The next time we're hiring I'll probably update it. The kicker though, like someone else below mentioned, is that we would receive submissions that didn't even compile. What I liked about the HW problem is that even something simple gives you and the candidate something to talk about. Why did you do this or that. Tabs or spaces ;) etc...
wahnfrieden 10y ago
Requiring a take-home assignment, not just offering it as an alternative to an in-person interview phase, is a great way to systematically reduce the diversity of your hiring pool. It works well for some, but please don't require it of everyone.
- nialo 10y ago
  I am confused by this, could you help me to understand why this is so? In particular, it seems to me that take-home assignments are strictly better for candidate scheduling etc than in-person interviews, if time spent can be held equal. Maybe time spent is just not equal very often?
  - stale2002 10y ago
    Because if a company is going to make me spend X hours of my time, then I want the company to be spending X hours of THEIR time.
    - hackinthebochs 10y ago
      Yes, absolutely. I say this every time this homework assignment shit pops up. It's offloading the cost of hiring on to prospective candidates. The asymmetry of cost should give everyone pause. It's plainly exploitative. So you block off 4-8 hours of your life for this job you're really excited about. What is the employer putting up? Generally nothing. They get a sea of responses and they get to pick a few of the best ones. The 100 responses they got cost these candidates 400 hours of time for no cost to the employer whatsoever. Take home assignments are fine, but the employer needs to put up something as well. Either pay for the time I spend on it, or have the assignment late in the interviewing process and have employment contingent on passing some known bar ahead of time. That is to say, I should be the only one doing the assignment and there should be no wishy-washy rejections.
      - gnaritas 10y ago
        > It's offloading the cost of hiring on to prospective candidates. The asymmetry of cost should give everyone pause. It's plainly exploitative. There's nothing wrong with that, it's a competitive market, those who get hired are those willing to compete, not those who complain about unfairness about being asked to demonstrate their skills. Employers spend tons of time filtering candidates, even reviewing the submitted work takes time and effort, saying it's no cost to the employer whatsoever is not only untrue, it's naive.
hackinthebochs 10y ago
We really need to stop pushing this HW assignment nonsense. It's offloading the cost of hiring on to prospective candidates. The asymmetry of cost makes it plainly exploitative. So you block off 4-8 hours of your life for this job you're really excited about. What is the employer putting up? Generally nothing. They get a sea of responses and they get to pick a few of the best ones. The 100 responses they got cost these candidates 400+ hours of time for no cost to the employer whatsoever. Take home assignments are fine, but the employer needs to put up something as well. Either pay for the time I spend on it, or have the assignment late in the interviewing process and have employment contingent on passing some known bar ahead of time. That is, I should be the only one doing the assignment and there should be no wishy-washy rejections.
- throw_away_777 10y ago
  To add on to this, a take-home assignment should be more than just another filter. The companies I interviewed for with take-home assignments didn't actually discuss the assignments at all in the in-person interview - I spent the time to prepare for and do the assignment, at least pretend it matters.
  - robinson-wall 10y ago
    That just seems odd. How were they checking that you were the one who completed them? All of the interview processes I've had recently have checked I did the exercise by either asking me to describe what I built with no aid, asking me to walk through the code with it in front of me, or asking me to conceptually expand on what I built on a whiteboard.
    - throw_away_777 10y ago
      They gave me the standard whiteboard interviews on-site after that. This was for a data scientist position. I did not get offered the job (but I accepted a good job offer a couple of weeks later, so whatever).
- akulbe 10y ago
Terr_ 10y ago
Daydreaming here: If every company's "homework" was representative of what kind of work you'd actually be doing, it'd be valuable enough to do.
- hinkley 10y ago
  I have not followed up with places because I was worried that the questions were representative. Remember, the interview goes both ways. You can look dumb for your choice of questions just as much as the interviewee can look dumb for their choice of answers.
golergka 10y ago
When I was hiring, I used a homework problem as well - something that we have actually built and released, and I encouraged candidates to look at our implementation (it was a single screen in a very UI-heavy mobile game). We did it in 8 hours, but almost all candidates took more. Overall level was pretty low that after reviewing about 20 homework assignments, and I had wasted a lot of time on post-mortem interviews where I just had to politely decline with a short code review (after all, they spent all this time, so they deserve something in exchange). After all, I started asking FizzBuzz (yes, not changing the name or anything) on the first phone interview to save time. And yes, turns out, it's not a task that any candidate can do. So, yes - homework assignments are great, but make sure that a candidate at least knows how to write a simple loop (and yes, I overlook off-by-one errors).
timbowhite 10y ago
My advice to job seekers who are asked to complete a "homework assignment" by a potential employer: Ask to see the company's employment agreements or contracts in writing first. I was once given a 10 hour assignment, which indeed took that long to complete. Afterwards, the company expressed interest in bringing me on, and sent me a work agreement to sign, which included many unsavory terms such as being paid for completed work 90 days out. Since their terms were shit, I didn't take the job, and lost 10+ hours of my life.
mr_tristan 10y ago
I also forgot to mention: - The homework assignment wasn't open and public: it was an option after doing a brief (30 minute) phone interview. - The other option was basically coming in for onsite technical interviews.
maverick_iceman 10y ago
Uber?

phamilton 10y ago

Additionally, most of us are more willing to do interview work in our off time. Taking a vacation day to interview is a direct financial investment. Spending a Saturday doing a 4 hour home work is a sacrifice, but doesn't require taking vacation time. Taking an early afternoon off to go talk with 3-4 engineers for 1-2 hours is something that can much more easily fit into ones schedule. EDIT: I want to provide an anecdote around this. If your salary is $150k, it may cost you roughly $400 in gross pay to interview somewhere. Sure, you could take paid vacation, but vacation time is paid out in cash when you leave so it still costs you. Companies with unlimited vacation are a different story.

pmiller2 10y ago

I'd totally go for a 4 hour homework problem, if it got me out of 2-3 hours worth of technical interviews.

mcbits 10y ago
I'd rather do 2-3 hours of technical interviews than 2-3 hours of "revive your most traumatic memory and tell me about it."

lbatx 10y ago

At my previous company, I was the hiring manager and gave a homework assignment that was targeted a little shorter than you describe, at right about 2-3 hours. I was clear upfront that it would take about that long, though if you wanted to take longer, you could. Within reason, I didn't hold the time against the person if they took longer. The crazy thing was that over half of the applicants that passed a resume screen and phone interview could not complete the homework assignment. Over half. Some couldn't get it at all (either gave up or had compile errors), some got it to run but it didn't work, a few got it to mostly work but their programs had serious bugs, and the last few actually got it right. The assignment was to read a file containing a list of numbers (some formatted incorrectly, so there was some very simple parsing logic involved), call an API using each correctly formatted number as a parameter, and store what the API returned to a file. I'm still shocked over half of developers couldn't accomplish that task. Makes me wonder what they were accomplishing in their existing roles.

vinhboy 10y ago
Thanks for sharing. I think this is a good data point to prove that most people will not cheat on their take home. There is no incentive to cheat. Why would you want a job you are not qualified to do. From your experience, it sounds like these are good tests, because it's screening for qualified candidates, unlike the phone interview.
- gambogi 10y ago
  > Why would you want a job you are not qualified to do. money.
  - gaius 10y ago
    Also, credentialling. Even if you can't do the work and only stay a few months, Google or Goldman or another big name on your CV will still open many doors.
    - wolfgke 10y ago

mdip 10y ago

Just wanted to say that I really like the idea of testing the "homework assignment" on your own team to hone it. I had a similar experience a month ago. It was a similar "4 hour project" but it was open ended with "make it as complicated or as simple as you want". Being a single table backed CRUD app, you could only put in so many capabilities but it got me excited thinking about ways I could surprise the staff. In the end, I made it self-hosted (in a language that self-hosted is less common), included an installer, and made it support multiple connections from different devices with updates that pushed to the connected clients. The project took me about a day and a half (with two of those hours spent yelling at WIX), but the core parts took about two hours. I was genuinely surprised at how much fun I had putting it together. They also asked me to estimate my time spent -- since I had contract work I was doing at the time and couldn't dedicate a long stretch all at once to it -- I broke it down into its individual tasks and documented the whole thing. They had no problem with the fact that I delivered it a week after the interview. I also second your "I can spare a half a day for a prospect" attitude. There's a flip-side benefit to that, as well. A candidate who feels over burdened with a simple assignment (provided it's tested as you mentioned and truly is simple) is probably not one I'd be interested in hiring, anyway. I'm not saying it's "one size fits all" -- I've had candidates walk in the door that I knew in advance were really good fits who were hired after a 30-minute screen. That, though, is a unicorn sighting.

hackinthebochs 10y ago
What if the HW assignment became the norm. Could you spend half a day, or a whole day to 10 jobs? What if after you spend all that time you still don't get any offers, or even interviews? Job searches are already hard enough (for most people) without these huge time sinks becoming the norm.
- Terr_ 10y ago
  You're assuming that such assignments would always be given improperly-early in the vetting process. If 10 good assignments meant at least 3 offers, it'd be a different story, right?

matwood 10y ago

My current company does something similar. I think back when I had to do it, it took 2-3 hours. It's a pretty basic problem using strategies and observers. The next time we're hiring I'll probably update it. The kicker though, like someone else below mentioned, is that we would receive submissions that didn't even compile. What I liked about the HW problem is that even something simple gives you and the candidate something to talk about. Why did you do this or that. Tabs or spaces ;) etc...

wahnfrieden 10y ago

Requiring a take-home assignment, not just offering it as an alternative to an in-person interview phase, is a great way to systematically reduce the diversity of your hiring pool. It works well for some, but please don't require it of everyone.

nialo 10y ago
I am confused by this, could you help me to understand why this is so? In particular, it seems to me that take-home assignments are strictly better for candidate scheduling etc than in-person interviews, if time spent can be held equal. Maybe time spent is just not equal very often?
- stale2002 10y ago
  Because if a company is going to make me spend X hours of my time, then I want the company to be spending X hours of THEIR time.
  - hackinthebochs 10y ago
    Yes, absolutely. I say this every time this homework assignment shit pops up. It's offloading the cost of hiring on to prospective candidates. The asymmetry of cost should give everyone pause. It's plainly exploitative. So you block off 4-8 hours of your life for this job you're really excited about. What is the employer putting up? Generally nothing. They get a sea of responses and they get to pick a few of the best ones. The 100 responses they got cost these candidates 400 hours of time for no cost to the employer whatsoever. Take home assignments are fine, but the employer needs to put up something as well. Either pay for the time I spend on it, or have the assignment late in the interviewing process and have employment contingent on passing some known bar ahead of time. That is to say, I should be the only one doing the assignment and there should be no wishy-washy rejections.
    - gnaritas 10y ago
      > It's offloading the cost of hiring on to prospective candidates. The asymmetry of cost should give everyone pause. It's plainly exploitative. There's nothing wrong with that, it's a competitive market, those who get hired are those willing to compete, not those who complain about unfairness about being asked to demonstrate their skills. Employers spend tons of time filtering candidates, even reviewing the submitted work takes time and effort, saying it's no cost to the employer whatsoever is not only untrue, it's naive.

hackinthebochs 10y ago

We really need to stop pushing this HW assignment nonsense. It's offloading the cost of hiring on to prospective candidates. The asymmetry of cost makes it plainly exploitative. So you block off 4-8 hours of your life for this job you're really excited about. What is the employer putting up? Generally nothing. They get a sea of responses and they get to pick a few of the best ones. The 100 responses they got cost these candidates 400+ hours of time for no cost to the employer whatsoever. Take home assignments are fine, but the employer needs to put up something as well. Either pay for the time I spend on it, or have the assignment late in the interviewing process and have employment contingent on passing some known bar ahead of time. That is, I should be the only one doing the assignment and there should be no wishy-washy rejections.

throw_away_777 10y ago
To add on to this, a take-home assignment should be more than just another filter. The companies I interviewed for with take-home assignments didn't actually discuss the assignments at all in the in-person interview - I spent the time to prepare for and do the assignment, at least pretend it matters.
- robinson-wall 10y ago
  That just seems odd. How were they checking that you were the one who completed them? All of the interview processes I've had recently have checked I did the exercise by either asking me to describe what I built with no aid, asking me to walk through the code with it in front of me, or asking me to conceptually expand on what I built on a whiteboard.
  - throw_away_777 10y ago
    They gave me the standard whiteboard interviews on-site after that. This was for a data scientist position. I did not get offered the job (but I accepted a good job offer a couple of weeks later, so whatever).
akulbe 10y ago

Terr_ 10y ago

Daydreaming here: If every company's "homework" was representative of what kind of work you'd actually be doing, it'd be valuable enough to do.

hinkley 10y ago
I have not followed up with places because I was worried that the questions were representative. Remember, the interview goes both ways. You can look dumb for your choice of questions just as much as the interviewee can look dumb for their choice of answers.

golergka 10y ago

When I was hiring, I used a homework problem as well - something that we have actually built and released, and I encouraged candidates to look at our implementation (it was a single screen in a very UI-heavy mobile game). We did it in 8 hours, but almost all candidates took more. Overall level was pretty low that after reviewing about 20 homework assignments, and I had wasted a lot of time on post-mortem interviews where I just had to politely decline with a short code review (after all, they spent all this time, so they deserve something in exchange). After all, I started asking FizzBuzz (yes, not changing the name or anything) on the first phone interview to save time. And yes, turns out, it's not a task that any candidate can do. So, yes - homework assignments are great, but make sure that a candidate at least knows how to write a simple loop (and yes, I overlook off-by-one errors).

timbowhite 10y ago

My advice to job seekers who are asked to complete a "homework assignment" by a potential employer: Ask to see the company's employment agreements or contracts in writing first. I was once given a 10 hour assignment, which indeed took that long to complete. Afterwards, the company expressed interest in bringing me on, and sent me a work agreement to sign, which included many unsavory terms such as being paid for completed work 90 days out. Since their terms were shit, I didn't take the job, and lost 10+ hours of my life.

mr_tristan 10y ago

I also forgot to mention: - The homework assignment wasn't open and public: it was an option after doing a brief (30 minute) phone interview. - The other option was basically coming in for onsite technical interviews.

maverick_iceman 10y ago

Uber?