13 ms·

Show HN: Takehome.io – Time-limited coding challenges for interviews via Git

134 points by davidbanham 9y ago

jakozaur 9y ago
I use Codility for code screening: https://www.codility.com/ https://www.codility.com/ In most of the Europe take home exams are common during the interview process, but your online test should be 1h (at most 2h). If you make it longer, very few ppl will invest that much time in competitive job market such as software engineering. Take home tests are way harder in the hottest market such as San Francisco Bay Area. A lot of candidates will simply drop out of your pipeline if you send them. IMO there are good for fresh grads, junior candidates or candidates that would you otherwise reject in resume screening. There are hidden gems, often in underrepresented minority that simple don't have anything impressive on their resume yet. Being able to identify them can be your competitive advantage.
- joezydeco 9y ago
  I've used TestDome in the past, http://www.testdome.com http://www.testdome.com. The tests are tidy and the in-browser IDE is not bad.
caleblloyd 9y ago
I think this looks really cool. I like the ability to send multiple challenges to a candidate. I also like that as a side effect, it tests a candidates proficiency with Git. I would choose a large time window- 4-8 hours or so. That way it ensures there is plenty of time to complete the challenge but also that it gets done in one day, like a normal workday.
- Tomino 9y ago
  By proficiency you mean clone and push?
  - caleblloyd 9y ago
    Clone, add, commit messages, push, ignoring dependencies, writing an instructive README.md, etc. All basic skills you'd expect a developer to have.
    - Tomino 9y ago
      Hardly you can call that proficiency. All they have to do here is to clone and push. Sorry but I tend to test git knowledge more in depth, maybe this level is enough for other projects
    - EpicEng 9y ago
      >All basic skills you'd expect a developer to have. Yeah, if they've used git before. Otherwise they'll need at least a solid 30 minutes to figure out the most basic git usage pattern. Do you really care about what source control system a person has experience in? Why? Any competent developer can pick it up quickly enough.
planetjones 9y ago
I don’t like the timeboxing aspect. It’s putting pressure on the candidate. I don’t know why the website says there is less pressure when it’s time limited. Do you have a study or other evidence to support this claim? For code exercises I set when recruiting I send a pdf out and then expect a zip file or link to GitHub or bitbucket with the solution. I might give an advisory along the lines of this shouldn’t take more than half a day. But if the candidate screws up and starts again that’s ok. Mistakes and wrong turns are taken all the time in the real world. It works very well. Simple. No complications. And free.
- davidbanham 9y ago
  Hey, thanks for the feedback. The idea is that the candidate knows they can do the best they can within the time limit, and then it's done. No agonizing over whether it's good enough or they should spend another few hours. No imagining how many hours and days other candidates for the same role might be putting in, wondering if they're going to stack up. I've used this approach with around 100 candidates hiring for various roles in my own business and for clients. The response I've gotten from candidates has been overwhelmingly positive. The problem I have with the traditional "don't spend more than about X time" approach is that it's not a level playing field. The responses to a challenge exist in relative terms, not absolute. It doesn't matter whether your response was great or not. It matters whether your response was in the top 5 of all the other candidates responding. It follows that you probably need to spend at least as much time, if not more, than all the other applicants for the role. How much time the other candidates _might_ be spending is basically unbounded, leading candidates to spend vastly too much time working on a challenge and then lying about it. If the candidate screws up a timed challenge that's also totally okay. It'll be a great conversation to have in the follow-up interview. "I started down this road, but if I was doing it again I'd do X, Y and Z because of A, B and C." Incidentally, I'd suggest that half a day is way too long. Especially if that half a day isn't actually enforced. When I'm hiring I usually set challenges of about 40 minutes, an hour and a half max. I'm not looking for a product that's ready to ship to production. I'm after a sense of whether the candidate can actually interpret a problem then string some code together, and something meaningful we can discuss in the next interview.
dvt 9y ago
I like the gist of this (I think take-homes are the best way to evaluate a candidate), but making it time limited seems weird. You're basically taking a test that you haven't studied for -- that doesn't seem fair (or fun).
- davidbanham 9y ago
  What is an interview if not a test? The code challenge portion of an interview process is a test that you've been studying for your entire career. As for fairness, I'd argue that timing it is the only way to ensure it. This way you know that the playing field is level between you and the other candidates applying for the role. To fun, I'd say that the least fun thing I can think of in this context is spending days wondering whether I had "done enough yet" in order to make my submission stand out ahead of the other applicants. Much more fun to know that as soon as that clock ticks over, what's done is done and I can get on with my life for better or worse.
  - xfer 9y ago
    How does your approach differ from the sites being already used by companies for online coding test? They do the same thing, you login during some fixed duration(24-48hr) in the weekend, and you do the coding challenges(they have a web interface to compile your code) within the alloted time.
    - davidbanham 9y ago
      I think the main difference is that those sites are geared towards outputting a ranking or score of some time. Takehome is geared at giving you a way to qualitatively assess the skills of each candidate and give you something meaningful to discuss with them in a follow-up interview. Also, all of the existing sites I've seen have one or more of the following problems: * Make you use their editor * Make you install their software on your computer * Make you use some specific language * Make you use their set of challenges Takehome uses nothing but git. Whatever you put in the repository and how you get it there is up to you. That holds true both for the candidate and the challenger. Takehome encourages challengers to create their own task matching the kind of work/language/framework/etc that's relevant to their team.
superplussed 9y ago
This seems useful, and I get the value. I'm wondering how you balance exactly how much time to allot? Do you try to come up with an average estimate of time needed and then like 2x that to reduce time anxiety?
- davidbanham 9y ago
  Thankyou! Any person using the site to hire candidates can set whatever time limit they like. When I'm choosing a time I'm actually less worried about the complexity of the exercise than how much of a candidate's time it's reasonable to ask for. If the challenge is too complex to be done in 40 minutes or so, I make it less complex. I also put language in the intro text like 'If you don't end up with a complete solution in that time, that's fine, just submit it anyway. We don't expect this to be enough time to write "The Most Perfect Thing".' If you're curious, sign up and take a look at the "Socialite" sample challenge.
juskrey 9y ago
My rule of thumb was to decline any interview with "challenges" - works perfectly as a filter of perverted corporate climate.
- asadlionpk 9y ago
  I wonder how would you do hiring for your fictional company? (Assuming you get 100s of shitty dev resumes when you post a job opening)
  - juskrey 9y ago
    I am actually hiring for my contracting projects - I just have a general talk and ask for a piece of any recent code. And even this is just a ritual: only real project in your (not other company) real work environment shows.
    - chii 9y ago
      > any recent code which is unlikely to be available if they aren't the owners of the IP. So either you have to guess real lucky, or have a probation period of a week or two with any new hire. Wouldn't you say that's worse than a short take-home project (for the employee)?
      - juskrey 9y ago
        I am not saying I don't have problems with finding people, I am saying here that companies are creating even worse problems by their naive automated HR assumptions.
    - jenscow 9y ago
      Well, if a candidate whipped out code from their work project then I would not hire, as it demonstrates a severe lack of respect of their employer's intellectual property. Of course, unless it was already on Github, etc. [while I'm in the "there's no secrets in software" camp, there are still policies and laws to follow]
  - 9y ago
igorgue 9y ago
How do you deal with rebase? Aka can I finish this in 1 commit within 8 seconds? Lemme interview at your company :D
zapt02 9y ago
Don't see the value of the service. It just sounds like a simple CRUD app where people can create "challenges" and send them out to potential candidates. And for so little done by the service, I find the cost to be completely perverse.
- lozenge 9y ago
  Yep, all it does is wait for the first `git push`, display the challenge text, then allow further pushes before the time limit and denies them after the time limit. A per candidate price quickly gets expensive.
  - davidbanham 9y ago
    The price is per-candidate to discourage companies from sending out more challenges than they have time to thoughtfully review. The expected use case is that you interview the candidate, then if you are both still interested you issue a takehome challenge, then you have another interview to discuss the challenge submission. If you're issuing more than 5 challenges per role you fill something somewhere has probably gone awry. $100 per role hired is no more than a rounding error. Also, the timer starts from the first `git clone` rather than the first push.
    - akind 9y ago
      the hole product could be a job interview challenge ;)
    - Tomino 9y ago
      IMHO trying to educate companies about their process is a sure way to failure. Also doing interviews before technical challenge is a sure suicide for companies. In my experience to minimise the waste of time you send out quick and easy technical challenge (no more than 30 minutes!) and you filter out 90% of applicants. With remaining 10% you have a phone call and if you have more than X (magic number of 3 in my experience) of qualified applicants you send out more thorough tech challenge (no more than 2h long!). Rinse and repeat until you get to X applicants which you will invite for face to face interview. Truth is that almost no-one in tech is qualified to do face-to-face interviews. Either they are not on the level technically or dont have the communication and HR skills. Interview in person is mostly to see if you are not dealing with a weirdo and if that person will be a good fit for the team. A side note, I tend to issue valuable response to every candidate. If you do that, they are very likely to re-apply, step up when someone drops out or recommend to friends. People tend to do/say the same dumm stuff so you can prepare those replies as well.
profunctor 9y ago
I thought I would chip in on the pro-time limit side as we seem to be underrepresented so far. I certainly have been given challenges that supposedly take 6 hours but clearly take much longer than that. An entire weekend at least. I don't have that time and I declined but if it really was a 6 hour test they would have gotten an attempt from me. A time limit makes it fair for those with other commitments.
sandGorgon 9y ago
this looks very cool - the single biggest thing that makes or breaks this space is the strength of the integrated applicant tracking system (ATS). Do I need to use another ATS ? then my team will just give up on this. If you have a limited ATS in there (with stuff like emailing from the dashboard, reading replies from the dashboard), then this is killer
- davidbanham 9y ago
  Currently no ATS at all. I've specifically kept it focused on doing a single thing well. I appreciate the feedback, though. I'll consider incorporating something along those lines.
z3t4 9y ago
Probably should offer a review service and coding challenges too! A company that is capable of reviewing and making code challenges surely has the competence to set up a git server, but there's plenty of companies that can't or don't have time, so I definitely think there's a market.
zerr 9y ago
Integrate the payment mechanism.
thrownaway954 9y ago
i will say that I like your pricing model. Free to try it out yourself and only $20 (or whatever the currency rate is in AUS) for each time you use it with no monthly fee. Personally this is how most online services should be, pay per use.
ahmedm 9y ago
We send much smaller coding tests using https://remoteinterview.io/ https://remoteinterview.io/. Take-homes require way too much time commitment from the candidate side. We have tried them but the candidates would never finish. With coding tests, we isolate a smaller problem and send that as a fizzbuzz screener. This scales well as solutions are checked automatically.
abglassman 9y ago
This is a great idea. I could see becoming a customer of yours if you added: - payment in USD - Ability to provide a post-receive hook to run validation / tests / benchmarks, and see results with the notification of submission. I appreciate that doing this in secure fashion is a nontrivial effort.
- emilecantin 9y ago
  > payment in USD Honest question: why? Can't your card / bank / PayPal do the conversion for you? (I say this as a Canadian who often pays USD with my Canadian card / bank account).
  - ascorbic 9y ago
    The bigger issue for me is pricing in USD, and less about the currency in which payment is collected. I'm in the UK, and while I can generally work out a rough exchange rate for GBP to USD and EUR in my head, I've no idea what the current AUD rate is. Making me check is a small but real barrier.
- davidbanham 9y ago
  Thanks! Webhooks to implement that kind of post-receive functionality are on the TODO list. If you like, get in touch at hello@takehome.io and I'll let you know once they're done.
mwcampbell 9y ago
I like it! We may quibble over what the time limit should be, but I think that doing coding challenges this way is the most inclusive and fair way to do a coding interview. All candidates do the work in their own environment, so one doesn't have to make an exception for, as one example, a blind person who can't write on a whiteboard. It's also more inclusive for potential interviewers; consider the challenges involved in a blind or visually impaired interviewer watching a candidate code in real-time. This way, the interviewer doesn't have to watch in real time, just as coworkers usually don't watch each other in real time on the job. Unless the team does pair programming, of course. To take it all the way, I think the follow-up discussion should be done strictly in text, using some combination of IM and a web-based code review tool. So the interviewer would call out parts of the PR and comment on them through the code review tool, and the two could have more free-flowing discussion over IM. Again, this would be just like the way it's actually done on the job, at least in my dream all-remote environment.
north_east_dev 9y ago
The idea of "take home tests" for an interview is utterly bizarre to me. Thankfully I've never heard of it my parts, seems to be a mainly US thing?
- Woofles 9y ago
  I think most jobs I applied to out of college had them. It is a good way to vet if someone can code before bringing them in for an interview and wasting a bunch of peoples' time. At my company we're currently struggling with not doing timed tests but not wasting too much of a candidate's time. We hire a lot straight out of college, which I think is probably where this type of test is more common.
- stevenwoo 9y ago
  There were two jobs I was curious about that sent me to hackerrank.com with a six hour test and a twenty four hour test, respectively, in Amsterdam and Barcelona.
- odiroot 9y ago
  This is spreading like a plague in Europe as well.
zng00 9y ago
This is too expensive and it doesn't even let me take the challenges myself without paying $20AUD, even though is says "Free Trial". Also, it's basically just 2 forms and some scripts.
- davidbanham 9y ago
  It definitely _should_ allow you to challenge your own email address without any charge. If you're still having trouble and you'd like to test it out, please drop me a line on hello@takehome.io and we'll figure it out. The trial has worked great for everyone else so it sounds like a juicy bug I'd love to hunt if it's not working for you.
crsv 9y ago
I like the trend towards tools like this helping with the software engineering hiring process. I know that these things can be points of contention in the community, but in general the problem of reducing the time commitment from the hiring team while still providing the candidate with a low-friction experience that produces a meaningful expression of capability isn't going away any time soon.
zackify 9y ago
I just completed the task in under 10 minutes for the example socialite one. It would be neat if the candidate could mark the repo as finished, so that you don't have to wait the whole time before it is over. Cool idea overall!
- davidbanham 9y ago
  Thanks, that's a great idea. I'll add it to my burndown.
sciurus 9y ago
A service where I can `git clone` a repo and that is what starts the timer for the coding challenge is a great idea. When I was recently job hunting, I had a bad experience with a company that wanted me to take a timed coding challenge where I would clone a repo and then submit a pull request with my solution. What started the timer then was them opening the repo to me, not me accessing it. This required us to agree on a time for me to take the challenge. Long story short, the recruiter proved incapable of opening the repo at the times we agreed on. Avoiding that need for coordination and chance for the recruiter to mess things up is a nice benefit of your service.

134 points by davidbanham 9y ago

I use Codility for code screening: https://www.codility.com/ https://www.codility.com/ In most of the Europe take home exams are common during the interview process, but your online test should be 1h (at most 2h). If you make it longer, very few ppl will invest that much time in competitive job market such as software engineering. Take home tests are way harder in the hottest market such as San Francisco Bay Area. A lot of candidates will simply drop out of your pipeline if you send them. IMO there are good for fresh grads, junior candidates or candidates that would you otherwise reject in resume screening. There are hidden gems, often in underrepresented minority that simple don't have anything impressive on their resume yet. Being able to identify them can be your competitive advantage.

joezydeco 9y ago
I've used TestDome in the past, http://www.testdome.com http://www.testdome.com. The tests are tidy and the in-browser IDE is not bad.

caleblloyd 9y ago

I think this looks really cool. I like the ability to send multiple challenges to a candidate. I also like that as a side effect, it tests a candidates proficiency with Git. I would choose a large time window- 4-8 hours or so. That way it ensures there is plenty of time to complete the challenge but also that it gets done in one day, like a normal workday.

Tomino 9y ago
By proficiency you mean clone and push?
- caleblloyd 9y ago
  Clone, add, commit messages, push, ignoring dependencies, writing an instructive README.md, etc. All basic skills you'd expect a developer to have.
  - Tomino 9y ago
    Hardly you can call that proficiency. All they have to do here is to clone and push. Sorry but I tend to test git knowledge more in depth, maybe this level is enough for other projects
  - EpicEng 9y ago
    >All basic skills you'd expect a developer to have. Yeah, if they've used git before. Otherwise they'll need at least a solid 30 minutes to figure out the most basic git usage pattern. Do you really care about what source control system a person has experience in? Why? Any competent developer can pick it up quickly enough.

planetjones 9y ago

I don’t like the timeboxing aspect. It’s putting pressure on the candidate. I don’t know why the website says there is less pressure when it’s time limited. Do you have a study or other evidence to support this claim? For code exercises I set when recruiting I send a pdf out and then expect a zip file or link to GitHub or bitbucket with the solution. I might give an advisory along the lines of this shouldn’t take more than half a day. But if the candidate screws up and starts again that’s ok. Mistakes and wrong turns are taken all the time in the real world. It works very well. Simple. No complications. And free.

davidbanham 9y ago
Hey, thanks for the feedback. The idea is that the candidate knows they can do the best they can within the time limit, and then it's done. No agonizing over whether it's good enough or they should spend another few hours. No imagining how many hours and days other candidates for the same role might be putting in, wondering if they're going to stack up. I've used this approach with around 100 candidates hiring for various roles in my own business and for clients. The response I've gotten from candidates has been overwhelmingly positive. The problem I have with the traditional "don't spend more than about X time" approach is that it's not a level playing field. The responses to a challenge exist in relative terms, not absolute. It doesn't matter whether your response was great or not. It matters whether your response was in the top 5 of all the other candidates responding. It follows that you probably need to spend at least as much time, if not more, than all the other applicants for the role. How much time the other candidates _might_ be spending is basically unbounded, leading candidates to spend vastly too much time working on a challenge and then lying about it. If the candidate screws up a timed challenge that's also totally okay. It'll be a great conversation to have in the follow-up interview. "I started down this road, but if I was doing it again I'd do X, Y and Z because of A, B and C." Incidentally, I'd suggest that half a day is way too long. Especially if that half a day isn't actually enforced. When I'm hiring I usually set challenges of about 40 minutes, an hour and a half max. I'm not looking for a product that's ready to ship to production. I'm after a sense of whether the candidate can actually interpret a problem then string some code together, and something meaningful we can discuss in the next interview.

dvt 9y ago

I like the gist of this (I think take-homes are the best way to evaluate a candidate), but making it time limited seems weird. You're basically taking a test that you haven't studied for -- that doesn't seem fair (or fun).

davidbanham 9y ago
What is an interview if not a test? The code challenge portion of an interview process is a test that you've been studying for your entire career. As for fairness, I'd argue that timing it is the only way to ensure it. This way you know that the playing field is level between you and the other candidates applying for the role. To fun, I'd say that the least fun thing I can think of in this context is spending days wondering whether I had "done enough yet" in order to make my submission stand out ahead of the other applicants. Much more fun to know that as soon as that clock ticks over, what's done is done and I can get on with my life for better or worse.
- xfer 9y ago
  How does your approach differ from the sites being already used by companies for online coding test? They do the same thing, you login during some fixed duration(24-48hr) in the weekend, and you do the coding challenges(they have a web interface to compile your code) within the alloted time.
  - davidbanham 9y ago
    I think the main difference is that those sites are geared towards outputting a ranking or score of some time. Takehome is geared at giving you a way to qualitatively assess the skills of each candidate and give you something meaningful to discuss with them in a follow-up interview. Also, all of the existing sites I've seen have one or more of the following problems: * Make you use their editor * Make you install their software on your computer * Make you use some specific language * Make you use their set of challenges Takehome uses nothing but git. Whatever you put in the repository and how you get it there is up to you. That holds true both for the candidate and the challenger. Takehome encourages challengers to create their own task matching the kind of work/language/framework/etc that's relevant to their team.

superplussed 9y ago

This seems useful, and I get the value. I'm wondering how you balance exactly how much time to allot? Do you try to come up with an average estimate of time needed and then like 2x that to reduce time anxiety?

davidbanham 9y ago
Thankyou! Any person using the site to hire candidates can set whatever time limit they like. When I'm choosing a time I'm actually less worried about the complexity of the exercise than how much of a candidate's time it's reasonable to ask for. If the challenge is too complex to be done in 40 minutes or so, I make it less complex. I also put language in the intro text like 'If you don't end up with a complete solution in that time, that's fine, just submit it anyway. We don't expect this to be enough time to write "The Most Perfect Thing".' If you're curious, sign up and take a look at the "Socialite" sample challenge.

juskrey 9y ago

My rule of thumb was to decline any interview with "challenges" - works perfectly as a filter of perverted corporate climate.

asadlionpk 9y ago
I wonder how would you do hiring for your fictional company? (Assuming you get 100s of shitty dev resumes when you post a job opening)
- juskrey 9y ago
  I am actually hiring for my contracting projects - I just have a general talk and ask for a piece of any recent code. And even this is just a ritual: only real project in your (not other company) real work environment shows.
  - chii 9y ago
    > any recent code which is unlikely to be available if they aren't the owners of the IP. So either you have to guess real lucky, or have a probation period of a week or two with any new hire. Wouldn't you say that's worse than a short take-home project (for the employee)?
    - juskrey 9y ago
      I am not saying I don't have problems with finding people, I am saying here that companies are creating even worse problems by their naive automated HR assumptions.
  - jenscow 9y ago
    Well, if a candidate whipped out code from their work project then I would not hire, as it demonstrates a severe lack of respect of their employer's intellectual property. Of course, unless it was already on Github, etc. [while I'm in the "there's no secrets in software" camp, there are still policies and laws to follow]
- 9y ago

igorgue 9y ago

How do you deal with rebase? Aka can I finish this in 1 commit within 8 seconds? Lemme interview at your company :D

zapt02 9y ago

Don't see the value of the service. It just sounds like a simple CRUD app where people can create "challenges" and send them out to potential candidates. And for so little done by the service, I find the cost to be completely perverse.

lozenge 9y ago
Yep, all it does is wait for the first `git push`, display the challenge text, then allow further pushes before the time limit and denies them after the time limit. A per candidate price quickly gets expensive.
- davidbanham 9y ago
  The price is per-candidate to discourage companies from sending out more challenges than they have time to thoughtfully review. The expected use case is that you interview the candidate, then if you are both still interested you issue a takehome challenge, then you have another interview to discuss the challenge submission. If you're issuing more than 5 challenges per role you fill something somewhere has probably gone awry. $100 per role hired is no more than a rounding error. Also, the timer starts from the first `git clone` rather than the first push.
  - akind 9y ago
    the hole product could be a job interview challenge ;)
  - Tomino 9y ago
    IMHO trying to educate companies about their process is a sure way to failure. Also doing interviews before technical challenge is a sure suicide for companies. In my experience to minimise the waste of time you send out quick and easy technical challenge (no more than 30 minutes!) and you filter out 90% of applicants. With remaining 10% you have a phone call and if you have more than X (magic number of 3 in my experience) of qualified applicants you send out more thorough tech challenge (no more than 2h long!). Rinse and repeat until you get to X applicants which you will invite for face to face interview. Truth is that almost no-one in tech is qualified to do face-to-face interviews. Either they are not on the level technically or dont have the communication and HR skills. Interview in person is mostly to see if you are not dealing with a weirdo and if that person will be a good fit for the team. A side note, I tend to issue valuable response to every candidate. If you do that, they are very likely to re-apply, step up when someone drops out or recommend to friends. People tend to do/say the same dumm stuff so you can prepare those replies as well.

profunctor 9y ago

I thought I would chip in on the pro-time limit side as we seem to be underrepresented so far. I certainly have been given challenges that supposedly take 6 hours but clearly take much longer than that. An entire weekend at least. I don't have that time and I declined but if it really was a 6 hour test they would have gotten an attempt from me. A time limit makes it fair for those with other commitments.

sandGorgon 9y ago

this looks very cool - the single biggest thing that makes or breaks this space is the strength of the integrated applicant tracking system (ATS). Do I need to use another ATS ? then my team will just give up on this. If you have a limited ATS in there (with stuff like emailing from the dashboard, reading replies from the dashboard), then this is killer

davidbanham 9y ago
Currently no ATS at all. I've specifically kept it focused on doing a single thing well. I appreciate the feedback, though. I'll consider incorporating something along those lines.

z3t4 9y ago

Probably should offer a review service and coding challenges too! A company that is capable of reviewing and making code challenges surely has the competence to set up a git server, but there's plenty of companies that can't or don't have time, so I definitely think there's a market.

zerr 9y ago

Integrate the payment mechanism.

thrownaway954 9y ago

i will say that I like your pricing model. Free to try it out yourself and only $20 (or whatever the currency rate is in AUS) for each time you use it with no monthly fee. Personally this is how most online services should be, pay per use.

ahmedm 9y ago

We send much smaller coding tests using https://remoteinterview.io/ https://remoteinterview.io/. Take-homes require way too much time commitment from the candidate side. We have tried them but the candidates would never finish. With coding tests, we isolate a smaller problem and send that as a fizzbuzz screener. This scales well as solutions are checked automatically.

abglassman 9y ago

This is a great idea. I could see becoming a customer of yours if you added: - payment in USD - Ability to provide a post-receive hook to run validation / tests / benchmarks, and see results with the notification of submission. I appreciate that doing this in secure fashion is a nontrivial effort.

emilecantin 9y ago
> payment in USD Honest question: why? Can't your card / bank / PayPal do the conversion for you? (I say this as a Canadian who often pays USD with my Canadian card / bank account).
- ascorbic 9y ago
  The bigger issue for me is pricing in USD, and less about the currency in which payment is collected. I'm in the UK, and while I can generally work out a rough exchange rate for GBP to USD and EUR in my head, I've no idea what the current AUD rate is. Making me check is a small but real barrier.
davidbanham 9y ago
Thanks! Webhooks to implement that kind of post-receive functionality are on the TODO list. If you like, get in touch at hello@takehome.io and I'll let you know once they're done.

mwcampbell 9y ago

I like it! We may quibble over what the time limit should be, but I think that doing coding challenges this way is the most inclusive and fair way to do a coding interview. All candidates do the work in their own environment, so one doesn't have to make an exception for, as one example, a blind person who can't write on a whiteboard. It's also more inclusive for potential interviewers; consider the challenges involved in a blind or visually impaired interviewer watching a candidate code in real-time. This way, the interviewer doesn't have to watch in real time, just as coworkers usually don't watch each other in real time on the job. Unless the team does pair programming, of course. To take it all the way, I think the follow-up discussion should be done strictly in text, using some combination of IM and a web-based code review tool. So the interviewer would call out parts of the PR and comment on them through the code review tool, and the two could have more free-flowing discussion over IM. Again, this would be just like the way it's actually done on the job, at least in my dream all-remote environment.

north_east_dev 9y ago

The idea of "take home tests" for an interview is utterly bizarre to me. Thankfully I've never heard of it my parts, seems to be a mainly US thing?

Woofles 9y ago
I think most jobs I applied to out of college had them. It is a good way to vet if someone can code before bringing them in for an interview and wasting a bunch of peoples' time. At my company we're currently struggling with not doing timed tests but not wasting too much of a candidate's time. We hire a lot straight out of college, which I think is probably where this type of test is more common.
stevenwoo 9y ago
There were two jobs I was curious about that sent me to hackerrank.com with a six hour test and a twenty four hour test, respectively, in Amsterdam and Barcelona.
odiroot 9y ago
This is spreading like a plague in Europe as well.

zng00 9y ago

This is too expensive and it doesn't even let me take the challenges myself without paying $20AUD, even though is says "Free Trial". Also, it's basically just 2 forms and some scripts.

davidbanham 9y ago
It definitely _should_ allow you to challenge your own email address without any charge. If you're still having trouble and you'd like to test it out, please drop me a line on hello@takehome.io and we'll figure it out. The trial has worked great for everyone else so it sounds like a juicy bug I'd love to hunt if it's not working for you.

crsv 9y ago

I like the trend towards tools like this helping with the software engineering hiring process. I know that these things can be points of contention in the community, but in general the problem of reducing the time commitment from the hiring team while still providing the candidate with a low-friction experience that produces a meaningful expression of capability isn't going away any time soon.

zackify 9y ago

I just completed the task in under 10 minutes for the example socialite one. It would be neat if the candidate could mark the repo as finished, so that you don't have to wait the whole time before it is over. Cool idea overall!

davidbanham 9y ago
Thanks, that's a great idea. I'll add it to my burndown.

sciurus 9y ago

A service where I can `git clone` a repo and that is what starts the timer for the coding challenge is a great idea. When I was recently job hunting, I had a bad experience with a company that wanted me to take a timed coding challenge where I would clone a repo and then submit a pull request with my solution. What started the timer then was them opening the repo to me, not me accessing it. This required us to agree on a time for me to take the challenge. Long story short, the recruiter proved incapable of opening the repo at the times we agreed on. Avoiding that need for coordination and chance for the recruiter to mess things up is a nice benefit of your service.