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Agreed. I did about 4 of those in a few months and got rejected each time, with no explanation at all. One of these was for a teaching position. Really a waste

Agreed. I did about 4 of those in a few months and got rejected each time, with no explanation at all. One of these was for a teaching position. Really a waste of time if you ask me. I learned nothing and wasted many hours. If a company wants to see what my code looks like, I have many projects available on GitHub. The only time I did one of these and actually got accepted, they used it as a justification for negotiating down my salary. "Your code was about 5 out of 10 on subjective code quality cool points, so we're cutting your offer by $10,000." Then they cut me loose after 6 months because the project was "over." This was for a full-time position. Now, if I get asked to do a take-home assignment, I ask instead if I can pair program with an engineer for an hour. If not, then I probably won't even continue because they clearly don't respect their engineers' time.

expertentipp 9y ago
The applications and stacks nowadays are so complex that yes, it's basically "anything you do will be used to lowball you" situation. Unless one creates fully compliant, fully featured application running on CI server. For free. And then begs for feedback.
dominotw 9y ago
> I have many projects available on GitHub. I was told many times that they don't have time to objectively evaluate this so they don't even look at these. Even the companies that explicitly ask for this never look at those. With code submissions they said they can objectively compare cadidates since they were measured by the same yardstick.
- tboyd47 9y ago
  "They don't have time to objectively evaluate this," to me, sounds like, "Our engineers follow extremely rigid and obtuse coding standards that have no relation to the outside world, and are unable to read or understand code written by anyone outside our company." On being measured up with other candidates, I'd really rather they assess me based on my skills and experience, not on a time-unlimited mini-project. The major factor in those projects is free time. I am always going to lose to a person with more free time than me, even though I may outmatch them in skills and experience. And if all they're looking for is someone with a lot of free time, that's not the sort of job I'm looking for anyway.

expertentipp 9y ago

The applications and stacks nowadays are so complex that yes, it's basically "anything you do will be used to lowball you" situation. Unless one creates fully compliant, fully featured application running on CI server. For free. And then begs for feedback.

dominotw 9y ago

> I have many projects available on GitHub. I was told many times that they don't have time to objectively evaluate this so they don't even look at these. Even the companies that explicitly ask for this never look at those. With code submissions they said they can objectively compare cadidates since they were measured by the same yardstick.

tboyd47 9y ago
"They don't have time to objectively evaluate this," to me, sounds like, "Our engineers follow extremely rigid and obtuse coding standards that have no relation to the outside world, and are unable to read or understand code written by anyone outside our company." On being measured up with other candidates, I'd really rather they assess me based on my skills and experience, not on a time-unlimited mini-project. The major factor in those projects is free time. I am always going to lose to a person with more free time than me, even though I may outmatch them in skills and experience. And if all they're looking for is someone with a lot of free time, that's not the sort of job I'm looking for anyway.