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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 wa

by 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?
  - hackinthebochs 10y ago
    That would be fair. But having that sort of expected result is impossible for many people. Of course, some people are good enough and sell themselves well enough that they'll never have problems passing such screens and getting offers. But for those that aren't, and worse don't know they aren't, will be able to reach that level of expected return without the process being designed not to exploit those situations.

by mdip 10y ago

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?
- hackinthebochs 10y ago
  That would be fair. But having that sort of expected result is impossible for many people. Of course, some people are good enough and sell themselves well enough that they'll never have problems passing such screens and getting offers. But for those that aren't, and worse don't know they aren't, will be able to reach that level of expected return without the process being designed not to exploit those situations.