4 ms·

Is it your ignoring the fact that some good candidates will just look at the job add see the home work coding tests and think "fuck you pay me" and ignore the

Is it your ignoring the fact that some good candidates will just look at the job add see the home work coding tests and think "fuck you pay me" and ignore the opportunity. Who needs a full 1 day of interviews plus time for phone interviews for an entry level job.

tptacek 9y ago
I probably don't need to be competing to hire the "fuck you I'm too good to do take-home problems" developers. Candidly: a significant fraction of those developers don't do take-home tests because they're extremely good at interviewing and... how shall we put this delicately... not so excellent at the skills required to solve straightforward programming problems. It's rational for them not to want to interview at take-home-test companies and rational for me not to want to hire them at all. That's why we started doing take-homes: because we kept having the experience of interviewing people with impressive resumes and sterling references who did not deliver at the caliber of the rest of our team. But even though we started doing homework challenges as a way of screening out bozos who interviewed well, we quickly learned something much more important, which is that for every talented developer you'll talk to with a strong resume, there are many --- probably at least 10's --- of talented developers who are underemployed because they don't have strong resumes. You also assume a job ad that basically says "We're the world's leading cat sharing company. Wanted: senior developer. Requirements: 15 years Python experience, must do homework problems". I don't blame you for assuming that because for some reason not a single recruiting team in SFBA seems to be able to write a decent job req, but that's not what our job reqs said, and we had zero problems. Finally: what's a company that hires software developers at any rank with less than a day's worth of interviews? I think you'll have trouble naming one. Even if you can, I don't think you'll have rebutted my point about the amount of energy it takes to complete a typical interview-based process.
- walshemj 9y ago
  From what I was told when applying for an avowed job at HMGCC for a Job requiring DV (TS) clearance you seem to require as much if not more FTF interview time.
- ubernostrum 9y ago
  I'll go a bit further than you here. My experience with using homework exercises in interviewing is that they provide a better signal of both technical ability and technical level than anything else I've tried. Also, I work for the company which published the article under discussion here, and did the homework exercise when I interviewed there. It was refreshing to be given something that was an actual open-ended real-world problem, to be solved in real-world conditions.

tptacek 9y ago

I probably don't need to be competing to hire the "fuck you I'm too good to do take-home problems" developers. Candidly: a significant fraction of those developers don't do take-home tests because they're extremely good at interviewing and... how shall we put this delicately... not so excellent at the skills required to solve straightforward programming problems. It's rational for them not to want to interview at take-home-test companies and rational for me not to want to hire them at all. That's why we started doing take-homes: because we kept having the experience of interviewing people with impressive resumes and sterling references who did not deliver at the caliber of the rest of our team. But even though we started doing homework challenges as a way of screening out bozos who interviewed well, we quickly learned something much more important, which is that for every talented developer you'll talk to with a strong resume, there are many --- probably at least 10's --- of talented developers who are underemployed because they don't have strong resumes. You also assume a job ad that basically says "We're the world's leading cat sharing company. Wanted: senior developer. Requirements: 15 years Python experience, must do homework problems". I don't blame you for assuming that because for some reason not a single recruiting team in SFBA seems to be able to write a decent job req, but that's not what our job reqs said, and we had zero problems. Finally: what's a company that hires software developers at any rank with less than a day's worth of interviews? I think you'll have trouble naming one. Even if you can, I don't think you'll have rebutted my point about the amount of energy it takes to complete a typical interview-based process.

walshemj 9y ago
From what I was told when applying for an avowed job at HMGCC for a Job requiring DV (TS) clearance you seem to require as much if not more FTF interview time.
ubernostrum 9y ago
I'll go a bit further than you here. My experience with using homework exercises in interviewing is that they provide a better signal of both technical ability and technical level than anything else I've tried. Also, I work for the company which published the article under discussion here, and did the homework exercise when I interviewed there. It was refreshing to be given something that was an actual open-ended real-world problem, to be solved in real-world conditions.