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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 an

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.

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.