4 ms·

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

by dilap 9y 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 9y 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 9y 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 9y 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
- dilap 9y ago
  It didn't seem to work out that way at the time; plenty of older people with kids were there. Probably it helped that we were in a smallish college town w/o a ton of other tech, & this was a while ago when the tech job market wasn't as crazy hot as it is right now. (Also, I want to emphasize, it was a challenging problem, but it wasn't a lot of code at the end of the day. If you knew what you wanted to do, you could knock it out in a couple of hours. But you had 3 days to mull it over or try different approaches. We were not asking you to build an app or something similar involving a ton of work.) I'm sympathetic to the fact that it's a big ask, but I really truly feel like it gave me a much better sense of candidates than just an interview & a resume (what we do at the company I work at now). It was also a fun problem to solve, and people would tend to continue to refine their solutions (to be better and faster) competitively even after they'd joined. FWIW.
mieseratte 9y ago
I've met folks, recruiters and (tech) leadership, at companies that do these type of long, arduous interview processes. They make it a point of ego / pride that they have such a long, arduous process. They've even mentioned the occasional candidate who asks about billable hours for an 8+ hour code problem, saying "Who the hell does that guy think he is?" Of course, they were shocked and appalled when I asked who they thought they were to ask someone to spend 8+ hours of their time on an code test before even having so much as a phone screen to determine compatibility. As it were, this was a company in the contracting space so I assume this is an intentional filter to weed out all but the most compliant individuals. If you're not willing to bend over backwards, they're not interested.
- bg4 9y ago
  What a great way for me to filter them out of consideration.
- JustSomeNobody 9y ago
  So, basically, they only wanted candidates who would willingly work in a sweatshop.
- walshemj 9y ago
  The answer is FYPM
wpietri 9y ago
If it's going to take more than a few hours, companies should definitely pay. I know that games developer ThreeRings did that. Once you got far enough along, they'd give you their games toolkit and ask you to build a simple, original game in, I think, 20 hours, for which they'd pay you a decent rate. I'm not sure I'd do that today, as it can exacerbate existing systemic bias issues, and cause you to miss out on good candidates who have lives where it's hard to free up 20 hours on short notice. Plus, I think there are cheaper ways to get that data. I now structure my interviews as joint work sessions. One round is a couple hours of pair programming; the other is a couple of hours of joint design and discussion with the team. The goal of both is to see people doing something pretty close to everyday work. I think I can get a much better feel for somebody's skills in a few hours of collaboration than 3 days of remote work with a big-bang delivery at the end.
tburmeister 9y ago
If you currently have a job then you likely can't accept payment without violating your employment contract, so you wind up having to do all this extra work for free anyway.

by dilap 9y ago

jschwartzi 9y 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 9y 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 9y 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
dilap 9y ago
It didn't seem to work out that way at the time; plenty of older people with kids were there. Probably it helped that we were in a smallish college town w/o a ton of other tech, & this was a while ago when the tech job market wasn't as crazy hot as it is right now. (Also, I want to emphasize, it was a challenging problem, but it wasn't a lot of code at the end of the day. If you knew what you wanted to do, you could knock it out in a couple of hours. But you had 3 days to mull it over or try different approaches. We were not asking you to build an app or something similar involving a ton of work.) I'm sympathetic to the fact that it's a big ask, but I really truly feel like it gave me a much better sense of candidates than just an interview & a resume (what we do at the company I work at now). It was also a fun problem to solve, and people would tend to continue to refine their solutions (to be better and faster) competitively even after they'd joined. FWIW.

mieseratte 9y ago

I've met folks, recruiters and (tech) leadership, at companies that do these type of long, arduous interview processes. They make it a point of ego / pride that they have such a long, arduous process. They've even mentioned the occasional candidate who asks about billable hours for an 8+ hour code problem, saying "Who the hell does that guy think he is?" Of course, they were shocked and appalled when I asked who they thought they were to ask someone to spend 8+ hours of their time on an code test before even having so much as a phone screen to determine compatibility. As it were, this was a company in the contracting space so I assume this is an intentional filter to weed out all but the most compliant individuals. If you're not willing to bend over backwards, they're not interested.

bg4 9y ago
What a great way for me to filter them out of consideration.
JustSomeNobody 9y ago
So, basically, they only wanted candidates who would willingly work in a sweatshop.
walshemj 9y ago
The answer is FYPM

wpietri 9y ago

If it's going to take more than a few hours, companies should definitely pay. I know that games developer ThreeRings did that. Once you got far enough along, they'd give you their games toolkit and ask you to build a simple, original game in, I think, 20 hours, for which they'd pay you a decent rate. I'm not sure I'd do that today, as it can exacerbate existing systemic bias issues, and cause you to miss out on good candidates who have lives where it's hard to free up 20 hours on short notice. Plus, I think there are cheaper ways to get that data. I now structure my interviews as joint work sessions. One round is a couple hours of pair programming; the other is a couple of hours of joint design and discussion with the team. The goal of both is to see people doing something pretty close to everyday work. I think I can get a much better feel for somebody's skills in a few hours of collaboration than 3 days of remote work with a big-bang delivery at the end.

tburmeister 9y ago

If you currently have a job then you likely can't accept payment without violating your employment contract, so you wind up having to do all this extra work for free anyway.