50 ms·

The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework

• NTDF9 9y ago
  Can someone explain why we need: 1. A phone coding interview (Potentially another phone coding interview) 2. A homework 3. An onsite with 5 rounds Seriously, what does that additional tree traversal round prove?
  • RickS 9y ago
    I don't necessarily buy fully into all of these (I am in favor of homeworks, but they should be paid and later staged [this usually means more phone screens. can't win em all]). But since you asked: 1) because meaningfully large swaths of applicants are too stupid to fizzbuzz 2) because passing fizzbuzz is not the same as writing software 3) because teams are comprised of many people in many roles and just because team/person X likes you, doesn't mean you'll be a good aggregate fit.
    • animal531 8y ago
      1. If applicants can't pass fizzbuzz then you shouldn't hire them and you can end the interview process right there. 2. Asking them to write fizzbuzz is exactly the same as asking them to write a method that does anything else, unless if they're aware of it and already knew how to do it, but of course you're asking them other questions as well? 3. Agreed, but it's impossible to match a new candidate with everyone in the company. If they're going to be working closely with person X then have that person sit in the interview for 15-30 minutes and see if they can work together on a problem.
    • NTDF9 8y ago
      I will respond: 1) I don't get fizzbuzz in first coding rounds anymore. It's usually graphs 2) Ok. I write software. Your whole team can go take a look at my software. Done coding? 3) Ok, so the last on-site round should be meet and greet then? Because I already submitted my code before. You guys all should have looked at the code and agreed to bring me on-site and just meet me. Why ask me to traverse trees again?
  • michaelt 9y ago
    Here's how it works in many companies: Hiring manager: Hey recruitment team, I've read articles saying <interview type A> doesn't work very well, we should try <interview type B>. <Interview type B> solves <concern X> Recruitment team: Sure thing, we'll start with a parallel run so we can see how <interview type A> results compare with <interview type B> Hiring manager: We've run both for a few months now, should we stop doing <interview type A> ? Recruitment team: Some hiring managers still like it, as it addresses <concern Z>. We don't see it as our job to second-guess them. You can spend your time and political capital convincing every other hiring manager, if you like? Hiring manager: I'm awfully busy with things that are a better use of my time.
  • cdoxsey 9y ago
    It provides a diversity of opinion. You might be surprised at how much disagreement there is about most candidates. Its probably one of the few parts of the process that actually makes sense, but the fact that people rarely agree belies the deeper problems with tech interviews. The selection criteria is way too subjective and the bar at so many companies set artificially high. In my experience your best bet is still to know someone on the inside. Though even that doesn't always work. A former intern of mine was rejected for a full time job at the company because he was "shy". Mind you this was someone who built something still running in production today. I do 3 or more interviews a week and the process seems like complete nonsense. (but its my job so I do what Im asked)
    • stevenwoo 8y ago
      Did they do something to correct the intern not being hired or they just wanted extroverts/loud people? I've erred on the wrong side going the other way, recall one interview on a team where I thought something was off with the candidate because they were so abrasive and then they got into a shouting match with one of my teammates (we thought they were fighting in the conference room), but when it came down to it I didn't want to be the only no and reject them. That was my fault because they turned out to really be a sociopath after a couple of months.
  • sidlls 8y ago
    Think of these interviews as a means by which interviewers assure themselves they're working on deeply intellectual CS problems and working with people who are incredibly intellectually gifted mathematicians practing computer science (like themselves), or that they're of the same caliber as what they believe of developers at FAANG, and it begins to make more sense.
• DataWorker 9y ago
  I think the tech interview process is an area ripe for workers’ rights legislation.
  • jpttsn 9y ago
    Might make it more expensive to hire, favoring insiders who are employed at the expense of outsiders. Also makes it harder to switch jobs if you’re unhappy/deserve better.
    • amorphid 9y ago
      I'd wager that insiders are given preferential treatment in most companies anyway.
      • vidarh 9y ago
        Some places, yes. But surprisingly many places do a really bad job at encouraging internal recruitment, even when it would often let them identify talent they are unaware of and let them shift people into positions where they might be a better fit or be stay for longer. It's especially bad as it can often help shift more of their external hiring to lower risk entry level hires where a bad hiring choice has a lot less impact.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• makeupsomething 9y ago
  As part of an interview I did recently I was asked to build a web app that mimicked a part of their service and deploy it somewhere for them to view. I probably spent about 15-20 hours on it in total and I believe I did more than what the brief asked for only to be told I did not get the job with no explanation, even after I asked if they had any feedback. I thing is I don't think anybody even looked at what I made because to view everything in the app required the user to login (part of their brief) but no new users showed up on the site at any point. Pretty frustrating experience overall.
  • arwhatever 8y ago
    I've resolved to always get the company to agree to give me feedback prior to working on a coding project. No guarantee of feedback, and I walk.
• jt2190 9y ago
  Focusing on the “what to do instead”... There's an interesting suggestion at the end: > Holiday’s company [CallRail, Atlanta, GA] now uses a structured “live-coding interview” format that involves reviewing code together and talking about it. The process typically takes between 30 minutes to an hour. I wish there were more details, like whose hands are on the keyboard, or whether the interviewer has a rubric to structure their evaluation.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• fxj 9y ago
  Are there any web sites where you can read what each of the companies do for their recruiting process? At least you would know what to expect...
  • collyw 9y ago
    Glassdoor has a section on interviews. I always leave a negative one when I have put up this this crap.
• pleasecalllater 9y ago
  I'm waiting for recruiting doctors like that. Oh, you are a surgeon with 17 years of experience? Cool. How about you make a surgery at home, record it, and send us a video? More pathetic are only companies which have only one question at the beginning (without any further contact) "how much do you want to earn" and after that there is no negotiation. Sometimes I feel like I'm drowning in an endless sea of candidates. Oh, wait, no, the same companies publish the same job ads over and over for years. So maybe not.
  • dagw 9y ago
    I'm waiting for recruiting doctors like that. Would you want to work in a world where all programmers have to be trained, licensed and regulated with the same rigor as surgeons? Surely the fact that programming is one of the few 'white collar' jobs where someone with no education and no relevant work experience can get hired based purely on the fact that they've taught themselves the necessary skills and can do the job is a net good thing.
    • LandR 9y ago
      > Would you want to work in a world where all programmers have to be trained, licensed and regulated with the same rigor as surgeons? Uh, yes... There are too many terrible developers out there.
      • collyw 9y ago
        Agreed.
      • CamperBob2 9y ago
        So you either use no commercial software at all, or you're happy paying a hundred times what you paid for it, and doing so in return for the privilege of running 1980s-era applications in 2018.
      • natalyarostova 9y ago
        The ability to build a top tier career from self-teaching is remarkable. It would be such a tragedy if this was stripped and replaced with a signalling based equilibrium run and/or structured by the government :(
• ldite 9y ago
  I've only been asked for this when I applied to a "digital design agency" (i.e. web development) during a moment of madness. They asked me to write a GAE based web app for something or the other. I told them (politely!) that I'd do it, if they provided me with their diversity policy, specifically with an explanation of how this sort of exercise didn't discriminate against anyone (as noted in the article.) I got a "sure, we can do that" and then never heard from them again. I didn't consider that a loss.
  • hnzix 9y ago
    >"digital design agency" ... during a moment of madness Yeah you dodged a bullet there. Digital design agencies are almost always sweatshops.
• danielh 9y ago
  I don't get it. The whole industry is complaining about not being able to hire developers, yet there seems to be some kind of competition who can come up with the most awkward hiring process. Requiring homework is a great way to deter the kind of people companies should be most interested in hiring: those who are not actively looking for a new job. I find this trend especially surprising considering that the U.S. has at-will employment where you can fire anyone anytime (at least that is my understanding, I'm from Germany). Why not get people at a desk quickly and evaluate them on the job?
  • abhinai 9y ago
    Just that firing someone is legal does not mean it is easy. Especially if you have been working closely with the said person for months. And then there are people who are very nice human beings but their performance just isn't good enough. Firing them is hard and pretty bad for team morale. I'd much rather do that extra work during the hiring process than have to deal with a bad hire later.
    • EliRivers 9y ago
      Money where your mouth is; are you willing to pay for it? Would you pay the candidate a reasonable sum, certainly over a hundred Euros a day (after tax etc.) for their pre-interview homework? Given that the cost of a bad hire is orders of magnitude more than that, this seems like a really good deal for the company.
      • abhinai 9y ago
        Absolutely. As you say, spending a few hundreds bucks is way cheaper than wasting almost half a day of the candidate and our team when we bring someone in and it ends in a no. For remote candidates it makes even more sense since we end up spending thousands of dollars in travel costs when we fly them in for onsite interviews.
      • gaius 9y ago
        are you willing to pay for it? Would you pay the candidate a reasonable sum This would be additional income complicating tax, and many companies restrict employees from taking on outside paid work without approval. No matter how you slice it, these multi-hour homeworks are a stupid idea. And the real reason for them is to discourage candidates to justify getting indentured labour instead. Or to discriminate against older workers with more existing time commitments.
• anon1094 9y ago
  I actually gave a link to my Stripe account and told the company I was applying to to pay me hourly as a contractor for doing this work. In the end, they took it offensively and denied me.
• anilgulecha 9y ago
  What you want from a hiring process is to be as objective as possible. For fresh engineers, the industry has settled on basic coding right from fizz-buzz to reverse a linked list and beyond. For more senior roles, majority still rely on pedigree (previous employer, resume etc), and those who try to be more objective hand out a take-home which ends up frustrating both sides. Candidates have to spend a lot of time and effort and the hiring manager/devs have to setup/run/review. This is where the industry needs to make the process easy, and operationally objective and efficient for the initial screen: An hour or 2 spent by candidate on a take home problem, which can be reviewed in under 5-10 minutes by the hiring manager. (This disparity in time is because the ratio of interviewed to screened is roughly that.) (Disclosure: I work at hackerrank, and build the take-home equivalent of a coding test.)
  • organicDragon 9y ago
    An interesting thing happened to me when I applied for an internship with your employer. I got a call, saying that I would have an interview few days days later even gave me the exact time. Come the day of interview, I got no call. And no response to follow up emails/calls. So, when somebody from hackerrank comments on the hiring process, it is a bit vexing.
• dosycorp 9y ago
  I don't want to name names but one YC company I interviewed at left me with the distinct impression that they talked a big game, just to get me to work on one of their (apparently) "strictly-hiring-related toy projects" as homework. Homework, "sure", except it: 1) integrated with a real system, 2) mirrored something they actually did, and 3) they would only agree to proceed if I signed an IP/work contract and accepted their (sorry, too small) payment of USD450 for the (not insignificant) project. I pushed back at the contract, and asked them to ask their lawyer if that was really necessary. When they insisted on a contract for the homework project I pulled out of the process. It just felt so wrong. The worst part, is not that they would seek some way to freelance a small part of their system, nor that they would actually use ideas from hiring interviews in their product -- but that (it seems) they would so blatantly lie to someone they professed to want to hire that this was homework, when in fact it was not. Even worse was the feeling of disrespect that they wanted to freelance part of their system for USD450, trying to abuse the hiring process/ talking a big game about offers, to unfairly lowball the price. Like they are a well funded, established, largish YC alum, at least they can afford to pay market. Anyway, everytime I see "XXXX is hiring a YYYY in ZZZZ" on here from them, I'm reminded. Feels good to vent. Just sad. Anyway, I'm not going to name names because this is unwise to do that in a public forum. Anyway, I only added the above anecdote after writing the following comment. This is why Triplebyte is so good. You do a single technical interview ( after a quick online quiz ), then get fast tracked to final interviews at various YC / silicon valley startups. Sure, maybe not everyone wants to work for a smallish startup. But some of their clients are 200+ people. So...it's not all the same.
  • collyw 9y ago
    I have noticed a trend of not naming companies here. Is it against the rules? I fell that we should name and shame companies that are disrespectful of peoples time.
    • JustSomeNobody 8y ago
      I don't believe I agree. Every story has two sides and I'm just not sure this is the forum to lay that all out in.
• Grollicus 9y ago
  I don't understand this development. In Germany, we've basically got full employment in the IT sector. Why would anyone waste their time with this? Just apply for the Job next door. As an employer, hiring someone new is always a leap of faith. Might work out, might not. If it doesn't, dont feel bad to fire people again.
  • ccozan 9y ago
    "In Germany, we've basically got full employment in the IT sector." I can only confirm this. I used to be a freelancer and I got almost daily offers per email and phone. In order to stop I ask them a very hi price per hour ( 90-100 euros ) and to my very surprise yesterday the guy said, "that's fine, when do we start?". I backed up a bit and after some discussion he told me that they really could not find anyone. There is really no IT people in Germany without job, so the only way to get work do is to turn to freelancers and offer a good rate.
    • majewsky 8y ago
      > very hi price per hour ( 90-100 euros ) Contrary to what you seem to expect, that price is a steal. A more realistic rate for contractors doing basic IT work (like configuring DB backups) is 400-800 euros per hour.
      • opencl 8y ago
        Please tell me where I can find these jobs that will pay six figures a year for two hours a week of basic IT work. This is more than an order of magnitude higher than anyone I know makes.
        • majewsky 8y ago
          Oh wait, sorry. I misread "per hour" as "per day". The original figure seems okay then.
    • jon_richards 8y ago
      You have a bit of the opposite problem in America. The market is flooded with applicants. The real issue is that many of them are woefully underqualified (see the fizzbuzz debate). It's a constant struggle to find a system that filters these people out without insulting the people you are trying to hire in the first place.
• cornholio 9y ago
  3 days of work is certainly an excessive commitment. But limiting the verbal interview to one hour then leaving the candidate with a a computer and a well defined problem that takes half a day to solve it's not unreasonable, in my opinion. They have already committed that day to this interview, there is no abuse - show us you can solve problems and not give up after a couple of Google searches, like a good half of programmer-aspirants do.
• tinix 9y ago
  Latest trend? Haven't we all gone through this before? Back in 2012 I did a "homework assignment" too, just to get an interview with a game studio. The task? Build a SOAP client and server that do some silly little thing, I don't even remember what. Basically, just something to prove competency. It took about an hour, mostly time I spent reading the manual for the programming language they requested. Trivial shit... WTF are people being assigned that takes multiple days? Ridiculous...
• 11235813213455 9y ago
  It makes sense to me, as long as it's somewhat related to the job context, so you can have a first impression. If it's directly contributing to them, of course they must pay. In any case this kind of work is a good practice, and is reusable, so applicants are losing anything
• purplezooey 9y ago
  I had one recently. Two nights it took me. Just a couple of questions will do. You don't have to come up with pages of shit from a committee.
• peteretep 9y ago
  In the UK I see a lot of tests that say "don't spend more than 2 hours on this", and that I'd generally expect to take 3-5 hours tops. Americans seem to have a strange employee / employer dynamic
• jaimebuelta 9y ago
  This is nuts and doesn't make sense. Testing coding abilities should only be done in the context of finding out if I can trust the resume (which should be relatively minimal), or if the candidate is looking for their first job (again, minimal as they won't have experience). The rest should be possible to analyse TALKING to the candidate or doing some join design session... Good luck making people spending more than 4 hours in a selection process if you're not Google (and even so)... Seems like a great way of massively discarding anyone that's busy...
• xab9 9y ago
  For my previous job I spent around a week to build a simple microservice from scratch, with login, jwt, email notification etc. - it's still not a full app of course, but it was very very time consuming (it was a bit out of my field), considering that I did not spend that time with family, hobby et cetera. I know noone forces me to do it, but back then I really had high hopes for that job. Nowdays the maximum I'm willing to spend with an entry app is two to four days but deep in my heart I still find it a bit too much, but I still prefer this over live coding sessions in front of a bunch of random devs.
  • gaius 9y ago
    Where do you get 2-4 days to work on an entirely speculative project?
    • xab9 9y ago
      Weekends, plus you may want to take a day off. Otherwise chip it off from your evenings. 7pm to 11pm through a week does the job.
      • gaius 9y ago
        These are unreasonable asks for just an interview. A read of their CV and a 30-minute phone screen, maybe two with different people, is all that is needed to determine if a candidate is worth bringing onsite, unless the interviewer and their company is utterly incompetent.
        • xab9 8y ago
          I share your opinion Gaius, but the recruiters seem to think otherwise. In the last year I've been to seven interviews (by all standards I am considered a senior dev with an appealing pedigree) and this is not something unexpected at all. The worst is that when they ask you to take three or five days off and work with the future team to see how you fit in (not for free though). I'm not too enthusiastic about it, but I already did it twice.
• xfz 9y ago
  It's not new - I did my first assignment around 18 years ago - and it's not necessarily a bad thing if done right. One problem is that assignments take too long and have over-optimistic estimates, which apart from taking up time can lead to feelings of self-doubt. Feedback on the assignments is lacking to no-existent, and this is an unforgivable sin in my book. Also, anything that looks more like a contribution to their own software than an academic test is a red flag. The other options noted in the article are also pretty bad. Whiteboards and fibonacci numbers, forget it. "Pair programming" in an interview is deceptive, nothing like normal pairing; it's a test (fair enough, but don't call it pairing). It's also problematic for me because I have a problem with my eyesight and any "accommodation" requested up front tends to be inadequate, leaving me at a disadvantage. For people with busy lives or family commitments, a short "interview prep homework" of 30-90 minutes would help the person to prepare, in their own time, in a relatively less pressured environment. The interviewer could then expand on this during the interview. I've done assignments like this where it proved a useful opportunity to brush up on a particular language (if cross-training or coming back from management), sometimes even enjoyed it. Also, it means recruiting is less of a numbers game - you might interview with a handful of companies instead of a dozen, choosing the ones you really care about. IMHO what we're seeing is a terrible implementation of a reasonable idea.
• longsigh 9y ago
  As a potential employee, I am just not going to do this. Nor am I going to complete puzzles (and I LIKE puzzles) or dance around in front of a whiteboard. What I would be willing to do is work as a well paid contractor for 1-3 months to make sure that we are a good fit for each other. I'm not sure how anything other than actually working together could suffice. I am fortunate enough not be concerned about immediate benefits like medical due to my wife's employment--I recognize that this might not be a good option for everyone.
• i_dont_know_ 9y ago
  Despite some of the comments here, I'm actually a fan of the 'homework' format. I'm not always great at hiring, but I know how to gauge the 'homework' interviews, and I've usually been right about the interviewee's abilities afterwards, WAY moreso than whiteboarding or riddles or any of the other alternatives. That being said, I would add some constraints: 1. The 'task' shouldn't take more than 30 min to understand, and no more than 1-2 hours to do. If it takes more than that, you should make some obfuscated dummy-code endpoints that do everything you're not directly evaluating on. 2. You should let the interviewee know that it should only take 2 hours as well. If it takes more, then there was either a misunderstanding in the task, or the interviewee doesn't have the right knowledge/experience/qualifications etc. 3. You should do your homework as well, meaning you've thoroughly reviewed the code submitted and have detailed questions ready to go for the interviewee. This should also be the 'control' to make sure the interviewee really did write the code (you'll know really quickly if they didn't) 4. No other coding tasks in the interview process. You can have them review code or suggest approaches to solve problems (things that people do on the job with others) 5. The interview should be shorter than if they were asked to do whiteboarding or live coding or anything like that. Most employers have (on paper) "trial periods" of around 3 months. A 1-2 hour coding assignment followed by 1 hour of well-crafted questions about the assignment (plus the usual interview stuff) should be enough to know whether or not you want to give the employee a chance for 3 months. (I realize most employers don't use the evaluation period for evaluative tasks, they just have the person start and hope for the best, but if done right, it's actually a pretty good system)
  • bgdam 8y ago
    Well when done this way with all the constraints you specified, then yes the homework interview works very well. Unfortunately, the vast majority of hiring managers do not come anywhere close to any of the points you mentioned. Just last week, I was interviewing for an opportunity as a VP of Engineering for a post-early-stage startup. The CTO gave me a take home assignment involving building not one but three complete applications (to be delivered in a docker container so it could be easily run). When I told him that I didn't have the kind of time it would take to perform this, he told me all the other candidates for the same role had no issues with it. I ended up withdrawing from the process. If senior roles itself are being hired like this, then I can only imagine how much worse it would be for individual contributor engineering roles.
• IshKebab 8y ago
  I think assignments are a really good way to test people, but they really do have to be short. The second-last job I got took around 4 hours which I think is fine. Helps if the task is a bit fun too. Also it shouldn't be the first stage of the interview process. That's just taking a piss. For this job it was after a phone interview, and with a scheduled face-to-face interview (where we discussed the code I'd written).
  • GeorgeSarkis 8y ago
    Getting a (new) job in IT is an exercise in futility if you don't know someone inside, so essentially there's not an interview but an invitation. It's lower-status, more degrading and has worser odds than cold-call telemarketers trying to sell you some new credit card. By the way, when a telemarketer tricks you into answering his call, you don't subject him to a 3-days intensive rectal exam ("homework") just for the remote possibility of getting a new credit card, which at the end you still don't buy anyways on some made-up pretense. So developers agree to way worse level of abuse and degradation than the lowliest sales guy.
    • LeozMaxwell 8y ago
      Also there's one and only one defense with respect to abuse either at interviews or after you get the job: having a large stash of money, which allow you to say NO to abuse. At least 5 years runway, entirely on your own "payroll". If you're actually competent, that's more than enough time to pick any skill (possibly starting your own business rather than look for a job using it), if you can do 12 hours per day by your own choosing on whatever you see fit. Don't have those 5 years but only 1-2 or, god forbid, have nothing more than a few months on top of a large amount of credit you have to pay back.... and you're in the 99% percent of desperate and destitute crowd who will submit to anything in exchange for a bowl of soup (guarantee they never break out of slavery). Problem with the solution is that it's a vicious circle: if you don't already have those 5 years of savings, chances are you're never going to save them anyways.
• toblender 8y ago
  I spent days almost 10 hours, completing a massive interview project for one company. I submitted a fully working solution, had unit test, was pixel perfect, and they didn't even give me an interview. Not only that they gave me a vague reason, only after pressing for feedback. Left a very bad taste in my mouth, don't think I'll be doing code assignments again, what a waste of time.
  • DenisM 8y ago
    Would you still do it if you were paid for your time? Say $500 for this 10 hour project.
    • toblender 8y ago
      That's a tough one... I guess it would make it better, but I'm not sure about how the taxes and relationship with the company would play out...
  • JustSomeNobody 8y ago
    There's no way I'd spend 10 hours on a take home for these reasons alone. I'd spend maybe 2 and call it good. If they expect a "pixel perfect" solution, then I'd better be able to do that in 2 hours max. Otherwise, they get what I submit and it will give us plenty to talk about during the interview.
• jpalomaki 8y ago
  ”..format that involves reviewing code together and talking about it. The process typically takes between 30 minutes to an hour.” This sounds like a good idea to try. Much less time consuming than having to create meaningfully things from scratch. Also more relevant as you don't usually need to write code in front of others, but you might need to review existing code.
• Dowwie 8y ago
  What do folks here think about an interview assignment where an applicant is asked to address an existing issue from an open source project, presented as a variety of cherry picked issues from popular projects but selected by the employer? The code would then be discussed during interview.
• dilap 8y ago
  I worked for a company that did a 3-day, challenging take-home problem. It was a big ask, but it was amazing for getting a sense of people's problem solving and coding abilities. (The final result would only be 1000 lines of code or so, but 3 days provided time to think and experiment with different approaches.) Maybe paying people for the time if you end up saying "no" is a nice compromise? If you are potentially serious about hiring the candidate and they are serious about potentially working for you, doing some "homework" does not seem like a major amount of effort in the grand scheme of things to me.
  • jschwartzi 8y ago
    This heavily biases your interview process to only take candidates with time to complete your homework: unmarried, childless new graduates. If you tried to give me a 3-day interview I would walk away.
    • vanadium 8y ago
      It also weeds out, disproportionately, those who have major obligations to family and other things outside of work I have no business asking about, regardless of marital status or children. Guess which socioeconomic groups it tends to disadvantage most? As a hiring manager (Director), I've long maintained the entire hiring process in tech is broken, and this movement toward requiring an arduous amount of unpaid personal time on "homework" is tantamount to abuse. Respect is a two-way street in the hiring process, and it starts with me showing them that respect for their time and obligations.
    • weego 8y ago
      I've ended up having a bit of a row in an interview over this kind of thing because people just bias their tests to expectations they don't even have of their current staff. 1000 lines of decent code in 3 days is a rare thing at the best of times. "we'd like you to just whiteboard some pseudo code for this problem that one of our senior engineers solved recently" "was he stood in front of multiple people, timed and drawing on a whiteboard when he solved it?" "no, but we're just wanting to see how you'd approach the problem" "well, I'd probably do what he did which is Google some stuff, read some stuff, have time to process it, then write some code and then probably restart as I figure out the direction I want, probably bounce an idea off a colleague or two to make sure I'm not just in crazy tunnel vision land and then I might have the makings of a solution. Shall I whiteboard that flow diagram for you?" interview ended abruptly at that point
• deepGem 8y ago
  I wrote a couple of these home works and finally gave up. In fact, I won't interview for any dev positions that require me to do a recruiter phone screen, another technical phone screen, a homework and then an onsite coding test. Expecting production level code in a homework is just asinine. I'd much rather do a timed coding test for 30 to 60 minutes and be done with it.
• 0x445442 8y ago
  If the software development industry was the home building industry... I'm a general contractor (Unicorn Homes Inc.) and I'm currently building a number of spec homes. We're going to need electrical work done in all the homes and I'm in the process of sub-contracting out that work. What I need from you, Joe Electrician, is for you to go wire the kitchen of one of these homes. Once you're done I will inspect your work and let you know if I'm interested in hiring you for more work.
  • azinman2 8y ago
    I wish that’d be a possibility.. there’s no good other way to really evaluate what happens with GCs.
  • Epenthesis 8y ago
    I've never seen a take home coding challenge that had even the possibility of being used as production code. For me it's always been a standardized, self-contained example problem. Maybe there're scummy companies that try to push job applicants' work to production, but I'd be shocked if that was anywhere close to the modal case. So it's more like "What I need from you, Joe Electrician, is for you to go wire up this demo kitchen frame that I've set up. Once you're done I will inspect your work and let you know if I'm interested in hiring you to wire up the actual houses I'm building.".
    • conover 8y ago
      I agree with this sentiment. We offer candidates a choice of initial step before an onsite interview: - A short phone interview using a collaborative editing tool like CoderPad. - An example project they can complete independently and turn in. We've designed this project to take about 2 hours to complete. Almost universally, candidates choose the "take home" project option.
      • Bartweiss 8y ago
        > We've designed this project to take about 2 hours to complete. Then you've got it right. It's good to see people admit whiteboard interviews are a crummy system, I think you can learn way more from X hours of "do a task on a real computer with the internet" than you can from the same X hours of "do algorithms work on a whiteboard". The objection, for me at least, is to "do 10*X hours of work on a real computer". It's bizarrely common to massively scale up the time investment when moving to this sort of task. And the answer is so easy - just don't do that!
• some_account 8y ago
  I prefer homework to timed, monitored programming sessions. But the task should never be a big task. When i interviewed for a backend development position, the task was to set up flask with two routes, connect to a dB and retrieve a couple of rows when user visited the routes. It was not hard even though I never worked with flask before, and it wasn't supposed to be hard either. It was a test if I had basic programming skills and that was it.
  • commandlinefan 8y ago
    > timed, monitored programming sessions When I found myself out of work last year, I interviewed for a big auto company - their interview process involved an online coding session. They gave me a spec for an assignment and asked me to complete it in 20 minutes - I could pick Java or Python. I picked Java, and got the spec - it was ridiculously simple. I can't remember the exact wording, but it was something like, "write a function that will print out the text value of a number in the range 0-4, given the numeric value (so if you got an argument of 3, you'd return 'THREE')". Well, in my haste to complete the assignment in the generous 20 minutes they gave me, I... didn't read the specification closely enough. I started writing a program that took in a _list_ of numbers on the command line and output their text values. It took about 10 minutes to code it and sanity test it - then I thought to double-check the description and, "shit, I misread it". So now, with 10 minutes remaining, I'm thinking, "if I change this to fit the description, they're going to see that it took me 15 minutes to come up with a pathetic function that should have taken me 2 minutes." So, I started refactoring the whole program to _contain_ the function that they asked for, but call it from a main routine that would parse the input, call the function, and write out the results. With 19 minutes on the clock, I submitted my abomination. The recruiter was kind enough to call me back and tell me that they had decided they had "better qualified candidates in the pipeline". Oh, well...
    • isostatic 8y ago
      > better qualified candidates in the pipeline Probably the ones that read the spec and delivered what was required. If you're going to gloss over something trivial, what does that say about your attention to detail?
• pfarnsworth 8y ago
  I think the best way to hire is to hire optimistically, without forcing ridiculous trivia questions or memorizing algorithms. Then give up to 3 months of mentorship. If the person doesn’t look like they meet expectations, then fire her quickly. Give them the remaining time up to 3 months as severance. This is the best way to do it because you're not subjecting people to bad interviews, and you're giving them up to 3 months severance if it doesn't work out.
• mixmastamyk 8y ago
  Prefer homework to coderpad nonsense. When a recent position asked for a 10-12 hour homework, said I cap them at 2-4 hours and quoted my daily rate. ;-)
• pwthornton 8y ago
  If you're going to expect people to do real work, you need to pay them. This is common in a field like journalism. Want to do a one or two day trial of a reporter? Pay them to write for you! Have them work in a real environment and do real work for publication. If you're not willing to pay people for their time, and it's not an executive position, asking for days of a person's time is asinine. Also, if the homework isn't really real world, I still don't think it's of value. Making interview processes longer doesn't make them more rigorous. Only rigor makes a process more rigorous. What I tend to do is have people do contract work for me, and if they do good work and people like working with them, I'll offer them a full-time position. Another way that companies get at this is with internships. They are a low-cost way to scout talent. I find that a lot of companies are mistaking theater for rigor. If you ask someone to do a coding assignment, and it's not the kind of work that your company would actually do, how much value do you get out of it? Can someone work with your APIs? Are they comfortable with your languages and systems? I have also found that longer interview processes that have more people involved introduce noise, not rigor. This is why I generally try to be involved in the entire interview process for people I am hiring. Want to work on my team? I'll screen the resumes, I'll do the phone interviews and then I'll bring you in in person. I'll be in on all of the interviews you have with various people. It's my job to hire great people to work for me -- not recruiters, HR or random people at the company. I involve HR at the end to get a sense for a person's personality, not at the beginning. As a manager, hiring is arguably my most important skill. A manager that can't hire is going to have trouble building a good team that works well together. So, getting the hiring process right is critical.
  • zero_intp 8y ago
    Thank you for an excellent write up of the duties of a hiring manager.
  • deepGem 8y ago
    Exactly. Just a week or two of contract work will tell you if the candidate is a fit or not. A 30 minute phone screen will tell you if a candidate is worthy of a contract. I think companies don't do this because a. They don't want to pay and b. They don't get to gloat 'we have a super rigorous hiring process'
• azinman2 8y ago
  I actually prefer take home. I’m not great at white board solutions as they’re basically asking you to solve something immediately with a gun to your head in real time. It’s very unnatural. Take home gives me time to think about something more like I would job. That said there needs to be a balance where the tasks are enough of a test to give indication of quality of work without taking 3 full time days to finish.
  • erichurkman 8y ago
    Whiteboard is cruel for actual coding. It's too far removed from your normal tools. Whiteboarding can be good for architectural design or stepping through something. A sixty minute screen share is the sweet spot for me. They get to use whatever environment they are familiar with. Seeing someone work in their environment also tells you potentially a lot about the candidate. Staff engineer that can't navigate their debugger? Senior engineer that codes by copying every line off of stack overflow and mashing the keyboard until the lines somehow work? Bootcamp graduate that builds test cases in Excel? Junior engineer that writes code in notepad.txt and pastes it into a Python shell? All things that I've seen happen that tell a different story than a whiteboard or a 3 hour submitted homework test.
    • azinman2 8y ago
      That’s interesting. How does one build test cases in excel?
      • erichurkman 8y ago
        It was a combinatorial sum-of-n problem. Given a sequence of integers, can you produce a target by summing N of the values. He used Excel to put the expected return value in column A, the target in B, and C+ were values. Saved as a CSV which his program ingested. It was neat, actually: the rationale he gave was that it made it easy for anyone to add test cases. (The candidate was previously in the accounting biz, so his navigation of Excel to do this was wizardlike to produce a few dozen test cases in about a minute.)
• xivzgrev 8y ago
  Yea I think live exercises are the way to go. Or hire person as contractor for a day or two. One small startup did that with me and I thought it was brilliant.
• newshorts 8y ago
  Not going to name the company but I topped 38 hours over a weekend to land a job at a tech company. It was brutal. But I still prefer that to those stupid algo questions. At a different company, I literally had an entire dev team sit on the opposite side of a table in a board room and play stump the programmer. After the interview I left hating the company regardless of the job offer.
• reefoctopus 8y ago
  I had this happen recently. Not only did they want me to do unpaid work as part of the interview, but that work was directly related to their business. They requested that I do this before they had even spoken to me. I responded that I was unwilling to do it in exchange for a chance at an interview. I was an excellent candidate, and I’d done years of work on similar systems that I could point to. This sort of thing is a huge red flag that the employer doesn’t respect the time of those who work for them.
• jlebrech 8y ago
  I had to choose on starting "homework" and accepting another job offer. I chose the job.
• everdev 8y ago
  As a developer and a manger, there are many candidates who fake or bolster a resume, especially in tech. Additionally, there are some developers who are incredibly smart, but take 2-3x the time as someone who is not as senior to do the same task. The only way I've found to reliably hire is a coding test. I think it's ethically irresponsible to choose actual client work for the task. But it is important to create a test that is similar and with a time constraint, especially if you work on any projects with deadlines so you can simulate how they work under a time crunch.
  • mentos 8y ago
    What about paying someone to do client work as a test? That is what I've found to be the best approach for me. It gives the candidate a very concrete understanding of the kind of work they'll be doing as opposed to a more contrived example. It comes at the cost of paying for poor work but usually some portion of it is salvageable.
    • everdev 8y ago
      Yes, another option. I guess my primary concern is sharing client IP with a non-employee. My tests took about 10min to write and 1-2hrs to complete and then we could do an apples to apples comparison across candidates. My concern about client work would be the time it would take to bring someone up to speed as well.
  • bluGill 8y ago
    Not just ethically irresponsible, it is probably illegal. Unpaid work that a company has someone do must be of no value to the company. It would be legal (though the ethics are still questionable) to give someone work after the client has decided not to give you a contract, as then there is no value in doing that work. This is why most big companies prefer to to hire contractors. You get someone for 6 months, if you like them you hire them, if you don't you let the contract expire.
• brandonmenc 8y ago
  When I first heard about this trend, I balked. But then I realized that the occasional two days of unpaid homework is still way better than being required to have a college degree or professional certification - unlike nearly every other profession that pays over $100k. I'll take it. For now.
• dep_b 8y ago
  I had to do homework assignments twice. Once was for TopTal, which kind of made it worth at the end since I've got a few years of work out if it already and they're supposed to check their candidates thorough. The other one was for Automattic that seemed to be intentionally vague to check if I would spot some pitfalls and smells they left behind. Never heard back. Mailed the guy that I had contact with twice. Not a fucking word. Thank you for wasting my time. I don't think I'll ever do it for free again unless it's a position for Godmaster of Cooltech at AwesomeCo.
• monksy 8y ago
  Things I've had to do lately for the "homework": - Write a game engine - Answer 5 programming problems in the span of 2h20m - Do 3 coding exercises over the span of 12 hours. (That was pretty brutal .. as that you have to build everything up yourself) - Write a REST service and business logic - Write a rules engine with depending rules and type. Worst part of all of this: When you're getting evaluated you're up for being nitpicked over spelling mistakes in the documentation.
• iandanforth 8y ago
  I'll take a 3-day take-home project over a whiteboard interview or live coding session any day. Working at my pace with my tools in my space? Yes please. The article makes two good points re: bias and lack of research. To the first I think it's up to us as interviewees to mention this in all of our calls. "Do you have a non-take-home option? For some groups this could be an exceptional burden." To the second there's no real answer other than a lot of companies need to try it out to see how they fare and then when they have a basic idea of logistics that work run a study on efficacy / predictive power.
  • markbnj 8y ago
    Came here to say almost exactly this. I can't speak to the bias issue. I do know that spending three days doing a little chat app last time around landed me one of the best gigs I've had. The process was painless, I would have spent that time coding and refreshing skills anyway, and the project was actually fun. I also know 100% that if the company I work for encountered a candidate who needed more time to work on the project due to child care or other responsibilities that would be quickly and happily accommodated. I wouldn't invest this kind of time as a first step, obviously, and would be turned off by any company that expected me to. I undertook this project after two 30 minute conversations had convinced both parties that there was a fit, and the project was a next step.
    • rhapsodic 8y ago
      >I undertook this project after two 30 minute conversations had convinced both parties that there was a fit, and the project was a next step. In this case, I don't see it as unreasonable, because you didn't have to do the project just to have a shot at someone talking to you in person. I would never do a homework project as the first step in an application process. I would do one as the last step, after I had learned enough about the job and the company to decide that I really wanted it, and they had narrowed down the field to me and a handful of other candidates.
      • minimaxir 8y ago
        > I would never do a homework project as the first step in an application process. I would do one as the last step, after I had learned enough about the job and the company to decide that I really wanted it, and they had narrowed down the field to me and a handful of other candidates. When I was job hunting last year, the steps typically went like this. 1) 30 min phone call 2) Homework 3) Algorithm Exam 4) Onsite I typically got rejected at #3 which means the homework meant nothing.
• shoguning 8y ago
  Work sample tests have been researched extensively in applied psychology [1]. There is a healthy debate on how effective they are. For me personally, I am not so much for or against 'homework', as would rather see it used correctly. For example, I want to know how it will be evaluated, no tricks. I also think there is a quickly diminishing return on the length of the assignment. Up to ~10 hours may be OK, beyond that seems like a waste. On the other hand, it's also a way to see who's serious. If you are serious about getting a job, it may take some investment. Also, the most glamorous companies can always demand a higher investment from applicants. 1. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=work+sample+test+validity&btnG=&oq=work+sample https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=work...
• ben_jones 8y ago
  I mean we can't have it both ways. You either hire with heavy credentialism or cronyism or you hire based on whatever trivial markers you can come up with for instant validation. Companies are trying tons of different validation markers, from white boarding, take home, stuff like triplebyte. The bottom line is you can't instantly validate how someone will perform over the course of a year or more. It takes time. But nobody wants to spend time so...
• ovulator 8y ago
  I've had this happen once. I applied for a standard Rails dev position. After the first interview they wanted me build some sort of standard CRUD app in Rails on my own time at home with specific requirements. I already had a full time job, as well as a family, so even though there was nothing difficult about it, I told them I probably wouldn't have time. They gave me extra time, I said okay. A few days before it was "due" I told them I wouldn't have time. They said they understood, and asked when I could come in for the next interview. I guess it was just optional homework?
• matchagaucho 8y ago
  Isn't the obvious answer to simply pay candidates $50 hr? This is still far cheaper than the costs of hiring the wrong candidate.
• donretag 8y ago
  One big issue that a take home assignment is that it removes the ability for the candidate to ask questions. Interviews are two-way streets. Nowadays, I reject more companies than I interview for based on an initial phone conversation. I have requirements in what I look for in a company and position, and some simple questions help me resolve many of the primary requirements. Given a take home exam, I will have invested hours of my time, before given a chance to screen the company. Just say no. End the madness. EDIT: I should add that when I mention a phone conversation, I meant with someone on the dev team, not HR. A take home exam after only an HR phone screen is not acceptable.
  • your-nanny 8y ago
    What questions, if you don't mind my askibg
    • LoSboccacc 8y ago
      work environment, fluidity of assignment, career opportunities, acceptance of suggestion, involvement of developers into the design process, key tools and applications, workflow automation expectations... there are lot little details that one can ask and will give you back a picture of how the working environment is going to be. here's a good starter list, even if I find it too formulaic and question you need to ask heavily depends on what your role will be: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-steps-to-better-code/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s... also, as an interviewer, if a candidate doesn't ask about the work environment and daily operations I'll take it as a potential sign of the candidate having never reflected on its own craft.
      • itronitron 8y ago
        includes dev-ops, pace of development, how and when does code end up in _production_? It is important to ask at least two different people separately because you are likely to get different answers.
  • hyperpape 8y ago
• your-nanny 8y ago
  A take-home seems most suited for new grads or otherwise entry level candidates.
• vinceguidry 8y ago
  Obviously if you don't have a job, do whatever you need to in order to get one. But code challenges are making it increasingly difficult to move forward in your career without subjecting yourself to inordinate risk. I've been going back and forth on how best to handle this newest trend. I don't think it's a good approach to just refuse to do them. But accepting the challenge and then not following through is even worse. So a mutual understanding of the deliverables and level of effort is required, otherwise job hunting approaches second job status. My current stance is to first negotiate the code challenge until it's fully in your wheelhouse. If you are unable to do this, politely decline to do the code challenge, citing time constraints. One job wanted me to do a basic web app wholly in vanilla Javascript with no libraries. That's a challenge I should have just declined. Second, refuse to accept time limitations. No company that's not paying you should be allowed to monopolize your time. One job had a hard 20 day limit and the task was both outside my wheelhouse and expected to make a measurable delta in their production application. I definitely should have declined that one. But if a company is willing to work with you rather than subject you to an inhumanly-inflexible meat grinder, that's the one I want to work for.
• wintorez 8y ago
  Why do you want to work for a company that gives you days of unpaid homework? If you're given such a task, simply state that you don't think you'll be a good fit for them, and move on. It is an employees job market at the moment, and every tech company has several unoccupied openings.
• andyidsinga 8y ago
  My response - and even how I got jobs early in my career as a developer was this: "let me know show you some of the software I've developed on my own - I'd me happy to tell you how it works, the tech involved and the patterns used ..yada yada" Corollary : if you apply for a job or walk into a tech interview and can't talk about these things, its a red flag for the interviewer. PS. Now well on in my career, and having started my own software business after leaving a bigco. I'm back to a very similar thing: if I go to a meetup / conference / sales call I better have some code I'm will to show and discuss ..and highlight what I consider my talents. (fwiw : it feels great to be back in this mode) edit: also : asking an candidate to do the kind of homework/coding is total BS. I wouldn't do it. But I would give them the line above :)
  • vkou 8y ago
    Someone who has spent 10 years, doing good work in a large company likely never built a single piece of software that they can show on their own. They may have built software on their own, but it would all be internal, proprietary stuff that they can't demo, and you have no way of verifying.
    • andyidsinga 8y ago
      Hmmm.. Agree they can't show it, but they can most def. talk about parts of it, their role and show contrived examples, discuss language skills, architectural elements, improvements they wished they could have made, how they worked with others on the larger team, presentations they made... the list goes on. This is especially possible given that a lot of work includes open source code, publicly available APIs, SDK services etc. In interviews I've conducted, when a candidate mentions these its an opportunity to dive into more detail on their expertise ..and again discuss contrived examples. In addition, probationary periods are a way to guard against complete mismatches.
  • h1srf 8y ago
    I have been developing software for 12 years. I can't show you anything that I've worked on because it has all been internal tools. I can talk about what I've built, but I can't show it to you or show you any code.
• speby 8y ago
  Our industry's hiring practices are absolutely obnoxious. In an ideal world, you could trust someone's resume. e.g. "I've written large production programs in C." Ok, great, so then clearly this person knows C so there should be no need to dissect code or run them thru some linked list algorithm and see if they know how to use pointers correctly. Yet, we do. Ok, then what about open source contributions (if they have them)? Well, sure, but we don't really know, for sure, if that code is their own or if they indeed truly wrote it, can we? So we can't count on it. It helps but it can't be an automatic "this person passes the technical" signaler. So maybe the person shares actual code and walks us through it that they wrote, even if not open source? Again, we can't know for certain it is their own code and not some friend who wrote it for them 2 years ago that they claim is their own. Or was a teammate's, or what-have-you. So we can't count on that either. Apart from getting a candidate to actually pump out some code, even trivially, we don't really have a way to de-facto verify that the person says they can do what they say they can do, short of a personal reference from someone, say, in the company already that knows and has worked with the person in the past. I absolutely hate this practice of having to constantly "re-prove" to the next employer that someone knows how to write software. It's extremely redundant and yet we keep on doing it, with no real hope of actually making it better.
  • pwthornton 8y ago
    You can tell if someone knows what they are doing by talking to them and having them walk you through what they have worked on. Also, in the United States, you could fire someone easily if they were really incompetent. Considering how much time and money people spend per candidate to interview, it's probably much cheaper and more efficient to hire faster and fire faster. Some companies are spending tens of thousands of dollars per candidate they interview! Hiring is a skill, and an overly long or drawn out process is a sign of bad hiring, not good hiring. The second part of the equation is to train people up and mentor them. Hiring is not enough. The second big part of good management is to actually get the most out of people and to help them learn and grow. Now if it were only the tech industry that had long, ridiculous hiring processes, maybe we could say that it is necessary, but many companies and many fields have similar processes. I believe that many people have mistaken length of interview process and time spent with rigor.
• booleandilemma 8y ago
  I say this every time this sort of article comes up here, but seeing how ridiculous this field has become, I wish I had chosen a different career path. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to go through all this bullshit the next time I’m looking for a job. I have a friend who is a pharmacist and I asked her what a typical interview is like for her. She said interviewers will typically ask something like “tell me about a difficult situation you had to deal with at work?”. No homework, whiteboards, group interviews, or stupid puzzles. No bullshit.
  • orangecat 8y ago
    She said interviewers will typically ask something like “tell me about a difficult situation you had to deal with at work?”. That's just another form of bullshit. I'd much rather write a for loop than try to figure out if the interviewer wants an honest answer or a humblebrag.
• tptacek 8y ago
  I believe the big problem people have with take-home work is trust. Nobody wants to do a take-home assignment that doesn't really impact their prospects of getting a job, or, worse, that has only downside for them. Hiring teams give assignments and then run a standard interview gauntlet. On both sides, most people believe it's the interviewers making the real decisions, without much consultation to the tests. The candidate thinks, what's the point? It's a seller's market. I'll work somewhere that doesn't haze candidates. We run work-sample challenges now, and (loudly) did so for about a decade at Matasano. We had essentially no complaints once we locked our process in. Part of the reason why, I think, is that we tried hard to be very clear about our process. But more importantly, the work-sample challenges made most of the decision. When we told candidates the time they spent on the challenge offset time they'd have to spend in person performing for an interviewer, we weren't lying. A 4-5 out of 5 average on our challenges more or less totally technically qualified a candidate; the odds were overwhelming that such a candidate would get an offer from us, and we told them so before they came in for interviews. What I think I see now is hiring teams who want to have things both ways. They don't want to take a leap of faith with a new process, so they're still abdicating their responsibility to random subjective interviewers. But they want to look on-trend and competent, so they assign homework. When you get on the phone with one of these teams and want to check them out, ask about the rubric for the challenge, and ask if they're going to do any on-site technical qualification after you do them (if they're giving challenges after the interviews instead of before, hang up the phone on them.) I'd be surprised if even half the companies that assign homework even have a rubric.
  • helper 8y ago
    Do you time box the work-sample or can candidates take as long as they want on it? Do you know what the average time is to complete the assignment?
    • tptacek 8y ago
      We have a suggested amount of time to take, but we don't put people on an actual clock or take into account how long it takes them to solve the challenges.
  • 8y ago
• fwdpropaganda 8y ago
  Come on. People complain about problems they have to solve on the whiteboard. People complain about problems that they can take home. This is approaching simple lazyness / entitlement.
  • meesterdude 8y ago
    It's lazyness / entitlemant because we want competent hiring practices that are respectful of our time? Because when you have to work 40 hours in a week doing nothing but take home tests & quiz projects for companies you are interviewing for - for the 38th week in a row - and still not taking in any money for all this - it's more about affording food and paying rent. The free work is the issue. Pay me for a day to do a project to validate my abilities and we're golden. I've done that at a few places, and it's a great way to go.
    • fwdpropaganda 8y ago
      Ok, so what do you do when you're asked to do homework?
• radicalbyte 8y ago
  This practice is a massive warning sign. I've only seen it applied by companies who lacked the technical competency to actually interview a candidate in depth. If the tech lead / architect is competent then he/she can just a candidate from the CV and an hour of chatting. The two worst developers I've ever had in my team both aced those interviews. How? Their colleagues did most of the work for them. It worked out great for me, it cleared out the dead wood and punished some faker at another company :)
• epx 8y ago
  I would love to have the chance of doing some work for a company being paid a low rate or nothing at all to prove myself. That's how I incidentally got my best jobs. In the last interview the RH recruiter labeled me "arrogant" - God knows where she took that one from. Most probably concealed ageism.
• slezakattack 8y ago
  I did a take home assignment a couple years ago where it was time constrained to 2 hours. At first, the idea sounded cool: nobody looking over your shoulder, I can listen to my music, use my tools, and work in my most productive environment. Selfishly, it can be nice (assuming that you didn't just have a long day of work and aren't dirt tired). I'm very quickly realizing it wasn't that great and in fact, comes off as lazy from the interviewer perspective. There are several "coding interview websites" where you can ask the question, give the candidate a terminal to code, provide a list of available languages, and even have unit tests from the interviewer side to make sure the solution is correct. We've completely abstracted out the interaction and questioning of candidates and it has become a binary "did they get it right or not" type of process. Sure, there's follow up interviews and such but what have you gained from this process that couldn't be asked over the phone? Worse yet, if you aren't using these tools and simply letting the candidate email you a project (or however they choose to deliver it to you), it can quickly become a time sink as you spend it trying to understand the solution (i.e. why did they interpret the meaning of "API" as a REST service? What is this obscure library they're using? etc.) No thanks.
• johnvega 8y ago
  It's probably not for most people, but this is how I got my job as a C++ programmer in CAD software industry (Computer Aided Design) that lasted over 10 years.
• newobj 8y ago
  It's unreal that will people will bitch and moan about having to invest a couple days, maybe even a whole week in cramming/prepping/interviewing, to perform on-demand, one time, for a job that realistically will earn them $100k, $200k, $300k, $400k+ a year. Meanwhile people that work harder than us 5 days a week for the entire duration of their career will make 1/2, 1/4, 1/6th, or less of income, with none of the perks, flexibility, mobility, etc. I mean good lord. People are asking for an objective/verifiable measure of a skill that's entirely in the domain of your supposed education and/or work experience. How much more straightforward can things get? Would you prefer that it be based on ... who you know in the company? How much you can bullshit your way through a soft skills quiz? How much buddy-buddy rapport you can establish with your interviewer? These are objective measures on a set of borderline "well known" problems, ... I can't imagine a simpler thing to prepare for. There is no guessing. The amount of hoping someone just "likes" you is at a bare minimum. The impact of resume fluffing is minimized. I literally can't think of anything more fair or objective. I can't even fathom people that aren't willing to make these miniscule one-time efforts where there are literally buckets of money waiting on the other side of the gate. Money that most non-tech people will never ever dream of obtaining. I'll take all my downvotes now, but I'm willing to karmically die on this cross. :P
  • FLUX-YOU 8y ago
    Look at other fields for examples. Few have to interview like devs do. Other professionals may have continuing education like conferences, but that's not the same. Imagine nurses or docs getting asked to take vitals for an interview.
    • trowawee 8y ago
      I mean, programmers also don't go through a medical school equivalent or residency. We don't take boards. I'm married to a doctor and we were together through her time in medical school and residency. If I had to choose between skill checks in the interviewing process and the 8 grueling years of hell that was med school and residency, I will take option 1 without a second of consideration.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• gelo 8y ago
  I went for a job interview with a company years ago just after I graduated. This was for a graduate position so I kinda made a few assumptive expectations on what they would want from me and my skills. Went in there, did their pointless psychometric tests (which by the way litterally have no relevance to my skills) went through their interview and went out their door passing it with flying colours. I got a call from the agent leasing with them. She was shocked to say that neither me or another they interviewed made the cut. I graduated with a first class degree with honours in Software Engineering. The company said I wasn't qualified enough for the graduate position! Told a good friend and lecturer at my university about this and he said, "pass me the name of the company, i'll get them barred from exposing internships and job oportunities to other students. Your time was utterly wasted and that was a completely pathetic reason to not accept you". The agent said to me that she would fight to testify my qualifications. I told her that there was no point. This company is not only wasting my time but your time as well. They dont deserve your time as an agent nor my skill set.
  • the-pigeon 8y ago
    Performing well at a job takes a lot more than just technical skills. Social skills and having a compatible personality with others on the team is very important to team success too. May have been something else but you saying "did their pointless psychometric tests (which by the way litterally have no relevance to my skills)" makes me suspect you failed for non-technical reasons.
• mazelife 8y ago
  A while back our company switched to the "homework" format for evaluating software engineering proficiency because we felt like it took a lot of stress off of candidates to write code in an unfamiliar environment (or worse, on a whiteboard). And I feel like it's worked out really well. But we have pretty strict criteria for any homework problem: it needs to be a simplified/toy version of something we'd actually ask the person to do if hired, and it needs to be something that a qualified candidate could easily complete in an hour. The code itself is, of course, valuable for helping us to evaluate, but honestly some of the best signals we get come from the open-ended discussion that results from us talking with the candidate about their code when they are done: "imagine this file you're processing is 100TB instead of 100kb? Would you change anything?" or "What if this clean data you've been given to work with had this or that issue, what might you do?" My only point of disagreement with this article is that it seems to assume that a homework problem has to be really time-consuming or burdensome, but there's no reason that has to be the case. To me employers who are asking candidates to spend hours or days on homework are of a piece with ones who ask people to solve tricky, unrepresentative computer science problems on a whiteboard: they reveal that they don't really know how to interview people and they don't have much respect for their candidates.
• hitekker 8y ago
  I once interviewed with a startup that disguised their technical-onboarding as the last step of the interview process. Learn three different frameworks, unlisted in the job description, and extend a github repo, suspiciously similar to their production codebase. That they insisted what was easily a 10-hour assignment could be done in 30 minutes "if you're already familiar", made it seem like they were offloading the learning-on-the-job to before-getting-an-offer. Cunning, but ultimately a sign not to sign.
• adamredwoods 8y ago
  While we're on the subject, I am tired of taking coding tests or homework, then getting ZERO FEEDBACK on the coding "test" I spent 2 hours (sometimes much more) on. If I am going to get rejected, then have the professional courtesy to give me constructive feedback on the code. In the future, I will ask for this up front before taking any more tests.
• jasonvm 8y ago
  I was recently on the job market and decided to apply to TripleByte as a way to hopefully skip some of the annoyances. The process involves a short online quiz, and then a 2-hour live-coding session with one of their engineers. It's supposed to demonstrate to potential employers that this candidate is actually skilled at coding. The problem were the employers, who just treated TripleByte approval as an add-on, instead of a substitute. One employer said I'd also have to do a take-home assignment (which was, I kid you not, recreate React) and then a 4-5 hour onsite. A few weeks later, that employer contacted me to see if I had completed the assignment. I told him I accepted another job. (Of course I didn't even bother starting the assignment)
• zaidf 8y ago
  I wish companies would figure out a way to have their best engineers do blind-shopper-style interviews where they regularly see if their best engineers would be able to make it through their current interview process. This can be tricky to implement but if done right, would provide lots of insight into the types of candidates their interview process is geared to pass. I asked a friend who worked for years at a large public company if he would have passed the company's interview process at the time that he left. His answer: "most certainly not!". I think his answer is astonishing. Here is a guy who is considered a top notch engineer at his company, assigned to help the company screen for similar top notch engineers and yet, the established process would specifically fail a good percentage of high-quality engineers of the type that already work at the company.
  • sudosteph 8y ago
    That reminds me. At Amazon there was a concept called "raising the bar" that was applied during interviews and promotions. The idea was that you should only hire or promote people with the capacity to do the job better than 50% of the people already doing it. I often wondered how sustainable that was. Will be interesting to see if they keep that strategy long-term.
    • stevenwoo 8y ago
      Combine that with stack ranking for evaluations and firing the bottom 10%, though I think they quit doing that recently.
• poulsbohemian 8y ago
  I've noticed an interesting trend in my career: the more grueling the interview, the less-satisfying the job. The jobs I enjoyed the most, had the most interesting challenges, etc, were the ones where it was little more than a handshake. The ones where they put me through hoop after hoop turned out to be the ones that were the least interesting and had the least upside.
  • the-pigeon 8y ago
    On the flip-side I've worked with engineers that were so entitled it completely undermined their ability to work with others in the company. Work is going to involve some bullshit. That's life. If you can't jump through a few hoops for a job then you don't want the job very badly or have an ego problem. Don't get me wrong, expecting someone to spend three days on a technical solution is nonsense. But the "special snowflake rockstar" mentality of some developers is not helpful and important to check for during an interview process.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• zaidf 8y ago
  My favorite interview anti-pattern: a position that stresses analytical decision-making, and then an interviewer that pushes you to give a quick, off-the-cuff answer to “do you think we should build X or not?”.
• mindhash 8y ago
  Given that interviews now a days are not one way street. Candidate is also evaluating whether company is worth working for. if you give a take home assignment and don't give me a feedback on stuff I could do better, i would consider the whole thing a waste of time. So if you don't offer that's ok. But let the guy learn a thing or two. Many people will agree that yc interview process is rigorous but it's also satisfying as you get to learn a lot through out.
• ospohngellert 8y ago
  I dislike tech interviews as much as the next guy, but let me pitch my two cents from the startup world. The company I currently work at has very few employees, and each new hire is a big cost. If a new employee does not work out, that can be a major dent in the budget. We still haven't figured out a great way to interview, and we are open to new ideas, as we have had hires who looked great on resume/interview who did not end up working out.
• kjhkhhhhhb 8y ago
  I suspect any kind of process will disadvantage somebody. For example the on site pair coding lauded in the article my disadvantage people with social anxiety or who can better focus alone, and traveling also takes a lot of time. That said, I would also reject homework assignments, as long as I can afford it. If they want it, companies should pay for it. Multistage interviews are also a big turn off. Imagine going on a date, and your date saying "I just need to try yet another date to see if I like you" multiple times.
• meaydinli 8y ago
  Anybody know the names of the companies that do homework/project type interviews? I am looking around as an Android dev, and I would prefer those over whiteboard/coderpad.
• MattyRad 8y ago
  To be the devil's advocate here.... There is such a low barrier to entry for our industry that virtually anyone can can call themselves a software developer after a week of coding exercises, compared to other engineering disciplines which have a very high barrier (mostly in requiring a degree and often difficult certification like the PE). What's worse is that even computer science majors aren't guaranteed to be an effective hire. This is NOT a new problem[1]. Ultimately I would argue that the risk is higher, for a company, of hiring an incapable engineer, than it is for an applicant being hired (and paid) as an incapable engineer. Requiring an applicant to demonstrate capability is smart. Where we draw the line for how much needs to be demonstrated is what is being questioned here. [1] https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/
• imglorp 8y ago
  Hiring story. It looked like it might be a devops position with a smallish family video site. After an NDA (?!!) and some emails, no interview, they set me up with an obscure chat client with a guy for a tryout. He had me set up some services on a new instance, apache, php, firewall, etc, following a checklist they gave. He wouldn't answer any questions about the company. I did this quickly and that was the end of it. In the end, they said no thanks, but did not give any feedback. They paid me for a day of work on Elance :-/ $50 for a couple hours of work. The bad news is the whole process was super shrouded and I to this day do not know why. The NDA forbade revealing any contacts, who the site was, or anything else. Nobody was willing to give me their name or answer any questions. I guess the vanilla family site could have been a sister/front for a gambling or pr0n or offshore hedgefund company, or ... what? Why bother?
• mike-cardwell 8y ago
  Reminds me of an "interview" I had last year with a secure email company that gets mentioned around here a lot. I was given a coding task to do. Think it took around about a full work day spread over a few days. Wrote some code. Submitted it. Got an email a few weeks later to say they'd hired somebody else. No conversation about the work I'd done or the position it's self whatsoever. My only communication with a human was basically somebody telling me they were going to be sending me some work. They originally sent me the work over Skype. I don't generally log into it Skype but I did in order to accomodate the way they wanted to chat (send the work). A few weeks after they told me they'd hired somebody else I logged into Skype again to find a message asking how to access the work I'd done from several weeks earlier. Even though I'd provided a link to it earlier on in the conversation. To this day I don't know if anyone even looked at the work that I spent a full work day doing. Perhaps they just didn't like the work that I did. I wouldn't blame them, I wasn't particularly proud of it. But I had a lot to say about the work, the problems I had and the things I would do differently if I were to start it again. I wasn't given the courtesy of expressing those thoughts though. The funny thing is, they approached me about the position in the first place. I wont be participating in any "interviews" structured anything like that ever again.
• naskwo 8y ago
  My dad was first concertmaster of the VSO, and my wife is a pianist. What's interesting is to look at the parallels between auditioning for a position in a prime orchestra and "auditioning" for the position of software engineer/developer. When you get called to audition, you spend a ton of time preparing at in your "free time". If you want to apply as a (senior) sw engineer, it makes sense to have an idea about the depth of knowledge and/or the engineering approach of the candidate. Oldie but goodie: https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/
  • stevenwoo 8y ago
    The other side of that coin is many orchestras now do auditions blind - nobody evaluating the artist can see the artist, they can only hear them. The numbers indicate that this eliminates most of the bias orchestras traditionally had for visual attractiveness/friends of the orchestra/white males.
• Bokanovsky 8y ago
  I've had to do a lot of telephone interviews and then face to face interviews. I'm regularly surprised how many developers can't do basic stuff. I'm not talking code that requires specific knowledge of an obscure area of an API or language, but things like picking the smallest values from an array (without using a language's built in array min function). At my current company we get them to write code (or something like pseudo code) down on paper. We give them a print out that clearly explains the task, which requires no domain knowledge and then leave them to it for an amount of time to write stuff down on paper. We then go back in the room and get them to talk us through their solution. But so many developers just can't do this. Then some can, and they can't explain the edge cases, what if the array is empty? What if it's null? What if it's all the same value? They'll just freeze. They would have past the phone screen first to get this far. We're not looking for more advanced stuff with red–black trees or an exotic data structure. Just a demonstration of what you've written and simple understanding. In reality, this is an invitation to a conversation. Why did you do it that way? Is there another way to do it? Which way do you prefer? Why? All if this is basic first principle stuff. Generally when you get to the good candidates you know. They can answer all these questions and you go in different directions with the questions, they're comfortable doing it too. You can get a technical conversation going. They won't lie and I say they can do X, the good candidates will quickly admit they haven't done X or Y, but their overall impression means not knowing X doesn't matter. The trouble is I've had so many candidates who are on the wrong end of the Dunning–Kruger effect. [Minor grammar edits]
• cosmocrackers 8y ago
  The problem I've always had with these take home tests is the open-ended nature of completion. They will tell you it should only take a few hours of work, but when it's not a timed assessment I'm always going to think, 'well, if I spend a few more hours I'll stand out more.' How does a company compare two candidates take home assessments when you have no idea how long they have spent on the problem. Candidate One is a great engineer but only has a few hours to work on it. Candidate Two is a mediocre engineer who spends 40 hours on the same project. Of course candidate two's solution is going to be more complete, but you haven't considered the time difference between the two candidates. When I'm hiring I've given coding homework, but it's time limited; 2 hours, scheduled at the candidates preferred time. I'm not looking for a complete solution, I just want to see how far you get and how you think through a very basic problems. It's trivial to compare two candidates when you know they've spent similar amounts of time on the problem.
• gshulegaard 8y ago
  Interesting, I actually prefer take home challenges to the previous trend of whiteboard interviews. And within the realm of take home challenges I prefer ones without time limits which usually implies they are full or multi day assignments. Even with rehearsal I am not a great public speaker and impromptu formats certainly don't make me better. I also prefer take home assignments since it is more closely related to how I actually do work: Get a problem, think about the requirements, do some research and design a solution, implement. Since I personally prefer this style of interviews, I have given assignments like this. Usually a simple microservice that is given AWS t2.micro size constraints and no time limit for a response. When I get a submission I am looking at code style, tests, and documentation as well as solution quality to get a better picture of how a candidate approaches tasks and gauge how they work independently. It's amazing how much you can tell about a single person from a challenge like this. I also think it is more flexible since there are no strict pass/fail criteria. A solution in C/C++ that optimizes heavily but skimps on documentation could be just as impressive as someone who uses Python to stitch together multiple tools with more features and more thorough documentation. Interviewing is difficult...for both interviewee and interviewer. Finding the right compromise between depth for the interviewer and work required of the interviewee is a challenge. I am sure there are take home challenges that are ridiculous, but I wouldn't dismiss all take home assignments.
  • default-kramer 8y ago
    With no time limit, aren't you just optimizing for the candidate with the most free time? (Granted, some people are more efficient than others, but you probably only want to hire from the top band of efficiency anyways. Meaning that "time spent" becomes the primary deciding factor.)
    • gshulegaard 8y ago
      This is definitely something to keep in mind, but we keep the requirements for the microservice extremely light for this reason (2 API endpoints). A solution submitted in a week with many extra features can be just as appealing as a solution submitted in a day with the bare minimum. It's not primarily about how much work is put in or how fast it is done; rather it is about the quality of what is included.
• maxk42 8y ago
  This literally happened to me last week. On a Friday night before my girlfriend's birthday they sent me -- without warning -- an assignment that "should take about 8 hours". I told them to give the job to someone hungrier than me which was the politest way of telling someone to stuff it I could think of. The company in question advertises here on HN's "Who's hiring?" threads, but the role was brought to my attention by a recruiter. Here's a little tip: If you expect to take more than 2 - 3 hours of someone's time, you should be paying them. Contract-to-hire and trial contracts are very common in the industry and most people have no problem with them. If you require a significant time commitment to interview someone then you should be respecting their time. I don't want to work for any company that doesn't respect my time.
  • exodust 8y ago
    But you didn't say how long they gave you to do it. Could you hand in the assignment a week later? I've never been given a homework assignment for a job interview, but I would love it. I absolutely hate the tests they give you on the spot, the last one I did was awful and made me angry! I would much prefer an 8 hour homework assignment. That pressure would be fun, and I get to work with my tools in my comfort zone. I spend 8 hours playing video games (over a few days), so putting that aside for a challenge with possible good job at the end seems okay to me.
    • maxk42 8y ago
      They wanted it done by Monday. Then I got to choose which day of my weekend I wanted to sacrifice: I chose none and I'll begin my new position at a company that respects my time Monday. To be clear: I've been given take-home "challenges" that take 2 - 3 hours each. Including at the company I wound up going with. I have no problem with these. If you expect me to sacrifice a full day of my time then you can pay me or find someone more desperate than I am.
      • exodust 8y ago
        Okay, they wanted it by Monday, yeh that's rough.
• tastyfreeze 8y ago
  It really seems like the best way to avoid the need for interview coding is to have a professional license for software engineers. Prove to a licensing board that you are competent in your desired specialties. I don't ever hear of structural engineers or medical doctors having to solve puzzle to get past their interview.
• recharged95 8y ago
  Yes, I had that offered too, a 6hr Xp assigment with a selected employee. But intentionally blew off the 2nd quiz (thus the interview) before starting the assignment due to a family medical emergency (I thought, WTF am I doing, there's more to life!) Nowadays I find it's either: a. multiple quizzes or HW assigment b. a presentation (that takes 4-8hrs to make anyway). c. and that github was a source of code eval, not anymore! ...cause everyone forks everyone's stuff (that's ok, by design).
• hammerbrostime 8y ago
  You could pay serious candidates for their time spent on long assignments, and a think that would fix quite a lot.
• DoubleGlazing 8y ago
  I've been experience this more and more lately. Some employers make their own tests, some rip off those from big players like Facebook/IBM/Google and some are just blatant attempts to get some work done for free. There is a lot of talk on HN about the best way to do IT recruitment, but whatever method is close it really shouldn't take more than a few hours of face-to-face contact and some legitimate tests. With HR doing due diligence by checking references etc after an offer is made. The first time I encountered this I was told that I would have to do a 8-12 hour coding challenger over the weekend. They wanted me to come up with a way of proving someone has watched a training video without skipping or faking an API call - something they admitted in their interview that their system was lacking i.e. free work for them. I told the recruiter that I would not be doing any such thing. I have young children and my weekend time is precious. If you can't validate my skills from my a few interviews, my detailed CV, plus HR doing due-diligence, then it makes me wonder about the organisational culture of your company.
• uhhhhmmmwhat 8y ago
  This absolute trend of garbage behavior has happened to me for a while now. That mixed with this so called absolute inability for employers to provide feedback because their so called policies do not let them. It is absolutely ridiculous how someone in a position of power is treating others who merely are trying to be part of the ingroup and get a job. This ingroup/outgroup "do these steps, and you will join us" mentality is complete shit. Especially on the part of these so called HR departments which claim they are having such a hard time finding right candidates. Before this jumping through all these hoops crap was invented, companies were hiring fine, people were working fine. Then these geniuses decided to profit and "flatten the world" as they call it. Just so they can make a buck. https://www.hackerrank.com/aboutus https://www.hackerrank.com/aboutus The only thing that is going to get you is a flat brain. Unable to think creatively, unable to respond to uncertainty but very very good at memorizing solutions to problems. And all this is based on this ignorant viewpoint that you can observe something or a product for a short period of time and somehow ascertain anything which you can use to form a useful opinion of a candidates future performance. Bullshit!!! No HR department should be allowed to ask any candidate to do any work without compensation. It is work since the HR department is using this information to make their decision therefore protecting or enhancing their companies performance. I don't know how this is not related work to a companies success. I am sick of it. I have started to send templated emails in response to them which explain i do not work for free. I can share personal code from past projects or my github. A few months ago a PR representative even called me once to make sure i was not going to sue when part of the application process was a take home assignment which was asking me to implement a new feature for their actual product. What a sham. When i said to her "You mean to tell me that over the past years when you claimed that this process has been the same, no interviewer has derived any benefit from free work of past candidates." She didn't even know how to respond. The more candidates that do not put up with this behavior, the faster it will stop and hopefully move onto something more agreeable by both parties.
• gd2 8y ago
  Hasn't this been going on for like 2 years? Or has the trend line made this more common.
• voodootrucker 8y ago
  Spend 20 minutes pairing with someone on real code, and you will know more about them than 2 hours of code review or any amount of interviewing.
• yosito 8y ago
  As a senior level engineer who's currently job searching, this trend is really burning me out right now. I'm at the point in my career where I don't want to work for just any random company (I've already worked for NASA and done client work for Young Money, Carrie Underwood, UFC and more). All of the positions I'm applying for are highly competitive. My resume performs well; I get interviews at 70-80% of the companies I apply to. And I usually have 3-4 interviews that go well. Then I get to the final stage, unpaid take home projects that last anywhere from a few hours to a week. Many of those go well too; I get feedback from companies saying they're really impressed by my work and that they'll talk to their team and get back to me with an offer. And then a few days later I get an email saying that they think I'm a really talented candidate but that they're moving forward with someone else. Over the last month, I've been working 50 hour weeks, unpaid, on code that's looked at once and then never seen again. It's really demotivating and exhausting. I think there are a couple of solutions to this; 1) Instead of unpaid sample projects, companies could offer paid trial periods where you work on real problems and get paid, with the option to continue as a full time employee after the trial. 2) Instead of doing tens of sample projects or exercises, one for each company you apply to, you could be evaluated one time by a third party and that evaluation could substitute for technical interviews done by the companies themselves. It would save companies the cost of evaluating candidates projects, and it would save candidates the cost of proving themselves time and time again. The evaluation could potentially be handled by different entities; tech recruiters, certification bodies, or standardized tests. This may be what companies like HackerRank are attempting, but they don't really seem to follow through with job offers. As it is, I'm trying to find a solution to my own job search. If anyone has any recommendations on how to find a job without burning out, I'd love to hear them.
• tgvarik 8y ago
  Here’s how we did interviews at the startup I used to work for. Phase 1: 30min non-technical phone screen. Usually we would have three people on our side of the call, but only one of us would do most of the talking. The goals were simply to describe the company and role to the candidate, gauge the candidate’s interest and ability to communicate, and allow the candidate to ask basic questions. We would discuss and decide whether to advance the candidate immediately afterward and usually notify the candidate on the same day. Phase 2: in-person code review, typically 1hr. We’d give the candidate the option of providing us with a (working) code sample from something the candidate had written previously, or of coding up a solution to a problem faced by our actual product. While I was there we had a good mix of candidates picking each option. The “homework” problems were always drawn from the product, so they were real, but we also kept them small, so that an average candidate could have a working solution in an hour or two. And we’d give the candidate a week with no other constraints. Candidates could use any language, could research solutions however they liked, and could email us any clarifying questions they had. Whichever option the candidate picked, the goal was just to get our eyes on a dozen sample the candidate had written and could be expected to understand. At the on-site, we’d have the candidate explain the problem in the candidate’s own words, then walk us through the solution. The goals were to determine how well the candidate understood the problem and how comfortable the candidate was with explaining technical decisions. It didn't matter to us if the code ran or even attempted an optimal solution; we advanced some candidates whose code samples did neither, but who were able to talk us through what they had tried to do and explain why it didn't work. Phase 3: working interview. We hired candidates for a day, paying $1,200–$1,600 for the day, depending on the role. The candidate would pair with a member of the team and work on some aspect of the product. The task was selected to be representative of the work the role required, but also simple enough that could be completed in a single day. At the end of the interview, the candidate got to ship the code to production (for which purpose we had a big, important-looking, physical red button). The goals were to determine how well the candidate functions in a working environment, how readily the candidate asks for help or conducts research, how the candidate responds to frustration, and how interesting and engaging the candidate finds the work. It was quite a time consuming process on our end, but it was extremely effective at finding excellent candidates. We never made a bad hire the whole time I was there.
• hellbanner 8y ago
  I just got one of these for a mobile position. "Please complete this coding interview. It should take about 3 hours." Me: "I've been writing mobile apps since the app store launched in 2008. Can we skip this step?" Corp: "Sorry, good luck on your search!"
  • cableshaft 8y ago
    > I've been writing mobile apps since the app store launched in 2008 That's your main mistake, admitting that. I'm sure they were looking for someone with five more years of experience than that. You should have been writing apps in a text editor waiting for the app store to come into existence, you know. I'm sure they picked someone with at least that much experience.
  • stevenwoo 8y ago
    Is it just me thinking it is weird to get hackerrank tests where they use a lot of Java stdin stdout on the test for a mobile position? It might be because that's the only way to grade tests on the platform but I have never used that in an Android app.
• mtnGoat 8y ago
  i think its utterly insane for companies that are well funded to ask skilled labor to work for free. if you want the best talent, attract it. i have refused every interview asking me to work for free, and ive never had problems finding gainful employment. these companies are just losing out on great talent by being shortsighted. only desperate people will work for free, and they are usually desperate for a reason. my $0.02.
• systematical 8y ago
  Sounds like it might be the same company the author is referring to. I'll throw them under the bus. Hello Fresh interviewed me and that interview went fine. They then wanted me to deliver an application using no framework. I was allowed to use libraries, but no framework. After reviewing the requirements I quickly determined that it would take me days to build an application that I felt would effectively WOW them. I told that to the recruiter and bowed out. Being already employed I looked at the opportunity cost and it was too high. Sure they paid more and are a bigger company, but that is A LOT of work. I rather do almost anything than unpaid programming on an application that will be thrown away in a few days. If I were hiring, the "lab" portion of the interview would be simple. For mid to senior level developer: 1. Write a small inefficient application that requires some indexes, SQL optimization, and some code optimization. Very, very small. Very, very easy for a reasonable developer to fix. Afterwards I'd have a conversation about other general optimization things like Redis, Beanstalkd etc... because we'll optimization is important, especially to me. 2. A small class with very poor cyclomatic complexity. Clean it up. Because clean code is important. 3. A small insecure application. Things like not using bind parameters in queries, not cleaning inputs, XSS etc.. Secure it. 4. Show me something you've done. Personal or professional. I would then ask questions and it would be an open conversation. Because I want to see how much you enjoy programming and how we'll you can speak about it. I think these 3 items, combined with the other interview questions, their experience, and resume would give me enough to go off. Ideally, 1, 2 & 3 can be done in under an hour. I think that is reasonable for pre-screaning an applicant. I certainly wouldn't send me running, but I am also writing the test so who knows... Why would I want to look through 10 or so applicants full fledged application? God no. I have better things to do. I guess for some companies its a way of weeding people out, but these large tests are akin to using DDT to remove weeds.
• brentonator 8y ago
  We had someone come in and spend 45 minutes on interview problems e.g. produce an array of 100 to 1. You had free access to Google and were encouraged to use them for reference. After each attempt we said no that's not right, and then at the end we were asked if we were going to use his code in our platform and if he should be paid. Felt kinda bad for him, clearly didn't pass the interview test.
• stratigos 8y ago
  Ive been grinding away at these for months... coming out of freelancing, latest contract with a startup that hit its burn rate and failed, and having beeen unemployed for almost 6 months (except not really unemployed, since contractors dont actually collect unemployment...). So many companies have these assignments. Theyre infinitely better than whiteboarding, or hacker rank tests, or "pair programming" on some crazy abstraction for only 30 minutes. Some of them are so much work - I am working on my 20th hour of a really involved full stack project, and still think I have about 6-8 more hours before its "pretty". Then I have 2 more to do, and I told the HR people at those companies Id do them 3 days ago. One weekend I spent 12 hours doing a SOA example project, and on Monday, the owner simply deleted the upstream - and my fork along with it - and said nothing back to me. I hadnt even turned it in yet! Hours, weeks... its been months of this. Im working for free and its just energy that goes into thin air. Not once has anyone actually done a real code review, I suppose they just get buried in hundreds of these little projects to review and select someone and just never get back to you :-/ Next week I have about 6 interviews lined up. Cant wait to see how many unpaid hours of work I get to do! ...oh, and I have > 12 years of industry experience, have built multiple applications that garner 50mm requests per month (I can almost guarantee you, that youve been on at least 2 of my websites before), have worked with IoT, HIPPA medical, ecommerce, greenfielded, been on big teams, worked internationally, have buttloads of experience, and every person Ive ever worked for praised and lauded me plenty. Yet I cant get a fucking job for the life of me because of these paint-by-number processes. Yah anyway, back to the grind, for free...
  • meesterdude 8y ago
    Man, thank you for writing this. I am totally in a similar boat - but at it for 3x as long. It looks like you are far more agreeable than me when it comes to these assignments. Consider that for most jobs, there is naturally a 98-99% rejection rate. Only one position and 300 candidates. So assume that most coding exercises you do will go nowhere, will not be reviewed, and will leave you feeling disappointed. You are a thought-worker, and an obviously talented one. The most important thing you can do is to stay nimble and don't get discouraged or bitter. Part of that means saying "no" to unreasonable requests. You don't have to full out say no - you can also just negotiate down the scope to something digestible. Identify your limit and push back should anyone attempt to cross it. For me, if it's a good company and the test is reasonable, i'll throw in 2 hours. If it's a BS test, I'll push back or skip entirely. These companies hiring with absurd processes do not know what they're doing - and will walk all over you/us if given the opportunity.
• PeterStuer 8y ago
  The main reason 'take home' assignments are BS: It will take the qualified person that needs to evaluate the submitted result more time to go through the code you produced and make a basic judgement, than it would take that same person sitting in a room together with the candidate to produce a far better judgement of the skills by just talking with the candidate if front of an IDE. Truth is many of these 'assignments' will never be looked at by a person that can actually derive good insights from the submitted work. Most of the superficial treatment they will receive could have been established in a five minute phone interview.
• jillesvangurp 8y ago
  I tend to regard interviews as an opportunity to determine if the company doing the interviewing is worth working for. People like me are highly employable/contractable. So, the way an interview works is very simple: you got lucky enough for me to take note of the fact that you are looking for somebody with my skill-set and I've determined that you are worth talking to. Fantastic, because I ignore all HR & recruiter spam so you probably found me through some mutual contact that I trust. Great, now we meet and my expectation is for you to decide to hire me on the spot and be extremely enthusiastic about it and get in a mode where you are selling the job to me as something that I want. We both know that nobody else similarly qualified is just going to walk in and take the job. If so anyway, my advice is to hire them on the spot. No hard feelings. So, very simple choice. Either we like each other or we move on. You don't get to ponder your decision for very long. The words "home work exercise" typically don't feature in such a conversation.
• bryanrasmussen 8y ago
  I have had the 'normal' 3 hour assignments, but recently I had one that was timed - they gave you 1 day to do it. I got at 10 at night, I thought I would have time but the kids had tired me out and I could not stay up 1-2 hours getting environment set up that I needed. So then actually I could not do anything about it until 5 in the afternoon the next day, I had problems with environment setup (hadn't needed this particular stack on my new machine so I hadn't set up and things had changed) so it took 3 hours. then I had to do dinner with the family, get kids to sleep. I didn't have the time available in my weekend to do a 3-4 hour assignment that also required 3 hours to get ready to work. I sent off an email to the recruiter and said what happened and I wasn't really interested in anything similar in the future.
• skate22 8y ago
  I gave a resume to IBM at a career fair. They made me do coding problems on the spot right there. Given an integer n, write a function to print ever digit backwards. It took me a minute to think about it, but i solved it, and evan ran it at home to make sure. Several months later they ask me to do an online 3 hour interview. I did it, there was no human interaction whatsoever. I had to record video responses and solve code problems. More than a month later with no follow up, i got an automated response to take another 3 hour interview with no human interaction. I did not take the interview and will never re apply to IBM
• mildweed 8y ago
  I touch on this point in my talk, “The Two Question Code Quiz” Slides https://slides.com/scottconnerly/2questioncodequiz https://slides.com/scottconnerly/2questioncodequiz Video: https://youtu.be/x8vmNXULbp4 https://youtu.be/x8vmNXULbp4
• mnky9800n 8y ago
  I did this for a data scientist position. It was obnoxious. Compounded by the interviewer believing his dissertation work was representative of the entire machine learning field. I didn't get that job. I'm more interested in the people I'll work with in hiring than what they know. to a certain degree anyways.
• expertentipp 8y ago
  In my last job search I solved a dozen or take home assignment. For the one I finally got, I... refused to solve the assignemnt... and it is a very good one. Do everyone a favor and refuse, fixing the situation is in hands of anyone looking for a job.
• bewe42 8y ago
  The best hiring process in my opinion: - select your candidates that maintain a public profile. You should get a broad idea about the skills and interest of that person - have an informal interview to see if they fit your company culture and values - then have them work on a small real project for less money I'm a dev and happy to work on such a "taster" project. It's a win-win: I'm not working for free, the company gets a realistic picture of how I work and how I fit into the company. This works naturally best for hiring contractors, but even then I don't understand why not more companies do this.
• lmilcin 8y ago
  I work as a contractor which means I change projects fairly frequently. In the past, I would sometimes accept the homework assignment. Now I refuse to do those (as opposed timed assignments where you get set amount of time, for example 2h, in which you are supposed to complete the assignment). If the homework deadline is few days you can practically be sure that there will be candidates that will spend all that time perfecting their solution. What is supposed to take "2-4 hours of effort" in the words of the interviewer is actually the entire duration from the moment your competitors got their assignments until the deadline. There are other reasons to refuse: - you can spend that time working to find other offers, - the interview is supposed to be both ways, they want to learn who you are but you are also supposed to learn who they are. Home assignments give practically nil information about your prospective employer. - there are other ways to test the candidate with probably same or better results. Choosing a way which minimizes the effort on the part of employer but maximizes the effort of candidate shows lack of respect for the candidate. - Home assignments are invitation for cheating. I can assume there are candidates that will take advice from others on how to solve the problems they are given so this is hardly proof of their ability. I refuse to take a test where I will be punished for my honesty. - Even though the assignments tend to be time consuming they are typically hardly challenging. This is typically some mundane application and not really a test of your ability. My ability is to solve complex problems, organize complex logic, produce extremely reliable or efficient applications, draw from wealth of my experience to propose and discuss solutions. Yet another Pet shop written in technology of employer's choice is hardly any test. If you want to know if I can program at all you can learn it in few seconds of conversation with me, you don't need to force me to do 2 days of programming for this.
• sb8244 8y ago
  For me, I think that unpaid homework is an acceptable, if not important, part of an interview. However, it must pass some qualifications: * It can't be taken as real work at all. Something like building a game is clearly not "real" for a SaaS company and still conveys lots of value * It should be discussed in person as the in-person technical interview (don't come in an whiteboard in addition to the outside work) * It is provided only after a phone screen and it is discussed on the screen. * There are clear objectives and "bonuses" * The language of choice can be used With this, I think that it provides value to the interview process and helps the interviewee as well by simplifying the in-person technical components of the interview.
• jigarkb 8y ago
  I worked for a company where I devised a 3 hour assignment given to candidates (full-stack developers) during on-site round. They were free to bring their own machine and work on their choice of stack. They were free to use any web resources available. I even broke down the assignment into small steps to follow. Assignment was to develop an application which tested the candidate's skills to access web api, browse through documentation, do proper authentication, parse api results and finally the most important skill to design an algorithm to compute desired output depending on the question asked. It was doable within 3 hrs for experienced engineer. Not many succeeded in this task but those who were able to do it were real good developers.
• stuaxo 8y ago
  I refuse outright to do this kind of thing... mostly, it's because I fail badly ! - I do fine in real jobs, but when it comes to tests and homework, I tend to not get the job. Also... I could be applying for other jobs in that time or doing.. you know, anything else - lying in bed doing nothing for instance. Seriously, this trend can go fuck itself... the last time an recruiter told me I had to write 100 words about 12 different skills I told her no, and hung up - only to send her a ranty email about how stupid the idea is.
• GordonS 8y ago
  I've never been asked to do a take home exercise (I'm in the UK, I guess it's just uncommon here). Out if curiosity, what kind of assignments are you being given?
• thegigaraptor 8y ago
  I've been on both sides of this, having completed and reviewed interview tasks, and I have to say it's absolutely crucial. As an interviewee, it gives you a glimpse of what work will be like once you come on board. Are the requirements solid or loose? Is testing required or even mentioned. These and other things can give you insight into how the business interacts with engineering. As an interviewer it's hard to take resumes and unfortunately even GitHub profiles at face value. I've personally had code taken from work put up on a colleagues personal GitHub. The coding task is also not a sure-fire way, as I've seen those taken from online tutorials. The real magic is in the tasks code review. I'm not saying this is how it works everywhere, but given the task matches the deliverables asked and we make it to the code review stage, it becomes less of a tech interview and more of a glimpse into the social skills of the developer. PR criticism is a daily occurrence and getting an opportunity to test these waters prior to fully committing to onboarding a developer.
• DataDisciple 8y ago
  Its not just devs that get these assignments. I've seen startups use BD folks for interviews to research and structure potential deals as a "homework" assignment. They dangle a fancy job in hopes of generating leads, which they do, and then they never end up filling the position. Candidates put in weeks of work setting up an actual deal for a fictitious job. I think these tactics are a lazy way to interview. If you truly want to build a great company, you need to spend significant time with someone to understand 1) can they do this job, and 2) are they a fit with the culture, and 3) are they passionate about the mission. There are no shortcuts, yet so many companies try to hack the process. Everyone is busy and looking for ways to steal time but this seems to be one of the most short-sighted. The best companies don't look at labor as just an input.
• AmrMostafa 8y ago
  I find it best to be asked that kind of homework after I have done my first interview. It usually means we both got a chance to pass and that the effort I will put will be seriously considered.
• TomAAnderson 8y ago
  The whiteboard interview is coding's version of being asked to do a freestyle rap. It's largely orthogonal to creating good code, but it's also a trainable skill that arguably does show something, even if that something is just a willingness to play the game. Whether it's worth seriously training for is another matter. Cue the music (sung to the tune of Eminem's 8 Mile Road, see https://bit.ly/2iI8tG2 https://bit.ly/2iI8tG2) and the scene of a nerd sweating in front of the whiteboard as the interviewers nod their heads to the beat: Sometimes I just feel like, quittin', I still might Why do I put up this fight, why do I still write (code)? Sometimes I just hate life, something ain't right Hit the brake lights, case of the stage fright Drawing a blank like It ain't my fault, great big eyeballs My insides crawl, FizzBuzz I scrawl And I clam up, I just slam shut Gonna travel this road Gonna show 'em my code My Big-O is so dope the universe will implode (as our hero proudly writes = O(1/n^2) on the board) etc. Someone can make a viral video; I'm too busy practicing code problems.
• plinkplink 8y ago
  How many of these homework assignments become actual code that companies use? If you ran a business and your programmers were all busy but you wanted some new widget, what is preventing you from posting a job and tricking 100+ programmers into bootstrap your project for free? A friend recently spent a week building a chat server with a very specific telnet/ssh interface as a "code test" for a video game company. I helped him test it and it was really solid. He walked the interviewer through the setup and how everything worked and then never heard back from them. I suspect that they simply used his code in their next project. What's stopping them from handing over his code to the next round of applicants with the assignment of adding all the features they need? They could post a high salary and offer great benefits, but never actually hire anyone. We, as developers, simply can't be giving away free work. We're all aware of how opportunistic business folks can be. I refuse to do "homework assignments" (unpaid work) and so should you.