4 ms·

And so playing the game of spending weeks studying CS problems and doing leetcode.com is somehow better?

wahnfrieden 10y ago
Senior candidates may have already ingrained this experience, so you will lose out on senior candidates if you require take-home assignments.
- bit_logic 10y ago
  Senior candidates are in the worst position for the typical algorithm/data structures interview. College is a distant memory and they need the weeks of study more than fresh graduates.
  - StevePerkins 10y ago
    Exactly. As a 15+ year vet, I love coding homeworks because: 1) I've been coding forever, and have faced code reviews in multiple professional environments. So your "6-8 hours" will probably only take me less than two, and my code will probably look better than yours to a reviewer. 2) I get tired of having to re-read "Cracking the Code Interview", because almost none of that is frequently used outside of academia. And dealing with smug 5-year journeymen interviewers, who are accustomed to asking 1-year juniors to traverse binary search trees and name all of the design patterns that they've memorized from books. No matter what process your company uses, there will always be people trash-talking it on the Internet. "I refuse to interview at those places", "I insist on being paid an hourly rate to deal with them", etc. I'm sure that 99% of this is chest-thumping bullshit. But regardless, if you're going to filter out part of the candidate pool no matter which path you take... I'd much rather filter those 25-year olds who feel too entitled to write some code, and legitimately believe that companies should just glance at their GitHub page and then hurl them a giant sack of money.
throw_away_777 10y ago
The thing is, the companies giving homework assignments still go through the regular onsite interview process. So it really is just an added burden of stress and time on the candidates. Arguably studying CS problems also helps job performance, though probably not as much as it could.
- quanticle 10y ago
  That's not always true. The best interview experiences I've had were at companies where you were given a homework assignment, and then invited on-site to talk about your solution for that assignment. That's not at all comparable to the standard Apple/Google/Microsoft/Facebook process where you're expected to come in and solve some graph theory or dynamic programming problems on a whiteboard for 4-6 hours. I would much rather do a homework assignment and then come in and have a code review or design discussion about my solution than do the standard process. And, I would argue that it gives the company a much better look at my skills and aptitudes than the whiteboard interview. I have never once written a dynamic programming algorithm from scratch, in 11 years of programming. I have implemented graph theory algorithms only a handful of times. But create a relatively basic piece of functionality, and then justify my solution in code review? I do that literally every day, and sometimes more than once per day. I understand that writing code for a homework assignment can be seen as giving the company I'm interviewing for "free labor". But, as others have pointed out, from the interviewee's perspective, there's not a huge distinction between spending 8 hours cramming Introduction to Algorithms and Cracking the Coding Interview versus spending 8 hours making a website using Django or Ruby on Rails (to name two interview tasks that I've actually been presented with). Frankly, I was much happier writing the websites, as it seemed much less pointless than memorizing how to write Floyd-Warshall all-pairs shortest path in Java on a whiteboard.

Senior candidates may have already ingrained this experience, so you will lose out on senior candidates if you require take-home assignments.

bit_logic 10y ago
Senior candidates are in the worst position for the typical algorithm/data structures interview. College is a distant memory and they need the weeks of study more than fresh graduates.
- StevePerkins 10y ago
  Exactly. As a 15+ year vet, I love coding homeworks because: 1) I've been coding forever, and have faced code reviews in multiple professional environments. So your "6-8 hours" will probably only take me less than two, and my code will probably look better than yours to a reviewer. 2) I get tired of having to re-read "Cracking the Code Interview", because almost none of that is frequently used outside of academia. And dealing with smug 5-year journeymen interviewers, who are accustomed to asking 1-year juniors to traverse binary search trees and name all of the design patterns that they've memorized from books. No matter what process your company uses, there will always be people trash-talking it on the Internet. "I refuse to interview at those places", "I insist on being paid an hourly rate to deal with them", etc. I'm sure that 99% of this is chest-thumping bullshit. But regardless, if you're going to filter out part of the candidate pool no matter which path you take... I'd much rather filter those 25-year olds who feel too entitled to write some code, and legitimately believe that companies should just glance at their GitHub page and then hurl them a giant sack of money.

throw_away_777 10y ago

The thing is, the companies giving homework assignments still go through the regular onsite interview process. So it really is just an added burden of stress and time on the candidates. Arguably studying CS problems also helps job performance, though probably not as much as it could.

quanticle 10y ago
That's not always true. The best interview experiences I've had were at companies where you were given a homework assignment, and then invited on-site to talk about your solution for that assignment. That's not at all comparable to the standard Apple/Google/Microsoft/Facebook process where you're expected to come in and solve some graph theory or dynamic programming problems on a whiteboard for 4-6 hours. I would much rather do a homework assignment and then come in and have a code review or design discussion about my solution than do the standard process. And, I would argue that it gives the company a much better look at my skills and aptitudes than the whiteboard interview. I have never once written a dynamic programming algorithm from scratch, in 11 years of programming. I have implemented graph theory algorithms only a handful of times. But create a relatively basic piece of functionality, and then justify my solution in code review? I do that literally every day, and sometimes more than once per day. I understand that writing code for a homework assignment can be seen as giving the company I'm interviewing for "free labor". But, as others have pointed out, from the interviewee's perspective, there's not a huge distinction between spending 8 hours cramming Introduction to Algorithms and Cracking the Coding Interview versus spending 8 hours making a website using Django or Ruby on Rails (to name two interview tasks that I've actually been presented with). Frankly, I was much happier writing the websites, as it seemed much less pointless than memorizing how to write Floyd-Warshall all-pairs shortest path in Java on a whiteboard.