8 ms·

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-

by 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.
  - user5994461 8y ago
    There are developers who went through a master or PhD at a top school, with a similar difficulty and debt to medical school. There are companies who will only hire you if you got a degree and relevant experience. The big tech companies never mention it but most of the workforce had a long education.
    - gms7777 8y ago
      Master's and PhDs in CS are typically not focused primarily on coding skills though. These individuals have a degree and publications that speak primarily to their conceptual expertise, which is important and significant but if the job they're interested in is mostly coding, that's an entirely separate skill. I know CS PhDs who didn't write a single line of code for their thesis. Going back to the medical analogy, just because someone has a medical degree doesn't mean they're a good surgeon. They'd need additional certification to prove their surgery skills.
    - newobj 8y ago
      I've never seen post-grad requirement for a dev unless it's a cutting edge research position and they need PhD's from the problem domain. Requiring a master's for a dev position is just a joke and I wouldn't take a company seriously that was asking that. Above not true for roles like PM, where for better or worse an MBA carries weight.
      - user5994461 8y ago
        >>> I've never seen post-grad requirement for a dev unless it's a cutting edge research position and they need PhD's from the problem domain. I've seen it in almost every place I worked for in London. The floor is either only people with degrees or only people with no degrees. The degree is never announced as a requirement, it's rather selected automatically during the interview. For instance in programming, some questions about state machines and graph traversal will do a wonderful filter.
- newobj 8y ago
  Imagine a nurse that failed to properly take vitals during an interview
  - Clubber 8y ago
    A more similar analogy to the practices that go on in tech, it would be asking the nurse to take vitals on a cadaver. It would never happen real world, but "there are so many frauds out there, this is what we came up with. You should now how to take vitals."
- rahimnathwani 8y ago
  People have to go through exams and other assessment before they can put the title on their CV. They've been tested multiple times on their ability to 'take vitals' and other basic parts of their job. Anyone can call themselves a software engineer, even if no one has ever tested their ability to reverse a linked list, or solve fizz buzz, or even write 'hello world' in a language of their choice.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- Arzh 8y ago
  Cooks do a stage after a phone / in-person interview where they work in the restaurant for a day or so (multiple days if they are expected to work with different people). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stage_(cooking) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stage_(cooking)
  - sampleinajar 8y ago
    Yes. As a former cook, it's only the high end jobs that do this, not the chain restaurants. I think that is some of the problem with our industry, imagine if Applebee's started doing this because The French Laundry does? But, I think that this example is a good one, because even a chef with 20+ years has to demonstrate their abilities in an interview. Where should that line be in our industry?
    - Arzh 8y ago
      Sure but with what even a low end programming job pays I would put it in the "high end" job spectrum.
- edanm 8y ago
  Many fields not only have extensive education requirements, like law school for example, but May have mandatory internships at low wages for several years. This kind of comment is exactly the kind of thing that makes some people think that software developers have no idea just how good they have it.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
incredible12345 8y ago
Many programmers make nowhere near $100k and so many programmers do a ton of extra unpaid work; and week-long interview preparations are just one of them. Just last night, a fellow programmer I know is being forced into "mandatory unpaid overtime" for the purposes of learning new things for his company. He has to learn more crap, together with coworkers, in his own 'freetime', regularly, unpaid. And I can tell you he makes nowhere near 100k living near a large city. That may be his problem for, but if the popularity of companies having "mandatory unpaid work" AKA slavery increases we will all feel these things even more so. That being said, I can't think of anything more viable than actually testing the programmer in question with code. I would personally give them a computer and have them do it right there on the spot in the interview but that is just me.
- newobj 8y ago
  The problem with your friend's situation is not a bad interview process, it's that they're being taken advantage of, and for some reason not improving their own situation, in a market where a good candidate is calling the shots on the terms of their employment.
  - ryandrake 8y ago
    99.9% of candidates are not calling any shots in this employer’s market. Unless you are a celebrity, widely known as a top candidate, the employer is pretty much going to be dictating the interview process, the job description, the compensation, and the terms of employment. If this were an actual employee‘s market, the friend might not be so underemployed.
    - Torn 8y ago
      Software is 100% an employees market. Everyone wants coders, and can be hard to pin down good ones. I think software engineers either don't know what they are worth, or are uncomfortable negotiating comp.
      - jonhendry18 8y ago
magissima 8y ago
If you're only applying to one job and you get it, sure. But when you're looking for a new job and sending out dozens of resumes, it adds up pretty quickly! On top of that, it makes rejections all the more dispiriting when you spend hours or days working on one job application.
- newobj 8y ago
  IMHO, if you can't land, say, 1 out of 3 interviews, there is a systemic personal problem, not just a bad day, and "the problem is u" -- sadly you will just need to work harder because something in your skill set is not up to snuff.
  - rahimnathwani 8y ago
    This ratio depends on how ambitious you are on upgrading from your current position. Imagine arranging all open jobs into layers. At the lower layers are jobs that you can do with your eyes closed. Towards the middle are jobs you're sure you could do, but would take some ramping up. Higher up are jobs that might be more rewarding, and you think you have decent chance of doing them well if you work hard to improve your skills once you're in. Your 1:3 odds will be different depending on your target. Maybe the commenter to whom you replied is trying to get jobs paying 50% more than their current job, but for each of these jobs there's only a 3% chance of getting it.
    - newobj 8y ago
      Fair enough. I wrote my comment assuming lateral or slightly upward movement, not a level skip, which I personally would never try to do between jobs, unless it was moving from a little fish in a big pond to a big fish in a little pond type situation.
  - magissima 8y ago
    Thanks for clarifying that your opinion was humble while insulting me. I was thinking of when I was getting my first job out of school, when I did three final interviews and landed one. The thing with the homework is that it typically comes well before the final interview and often even a phone interview. Often it would be the very first step in the process. I only had one application require a substantial (say, 4+ hours) amount of homework, but I had a lot more give 2 to 3 hour assignments. That was annoying, but considering I was unemployed and job searching full-time, it was manageable. If it becomes more common, as seems to be happening, it'll absolutely become an issue for anyone who has to do more than a couple of job applications, which probably includes most people trying to move up in position or relocate.
mywittyname 8y ago
Personally, I think it's fine to expect employers to verify a candidates skills. But they should also limit their verification to the minimum amount necessary. People are just arguing where that line should be drawn. Whether it's hours, days, or months of verification. Some careers do require months of unpaid internships in order to get jobs. And it's not because it takes months to verify a person's ability, but because companies will do anything they can to pay people as little as possible for their work.
- newobj 8y ago
  It's wrong if the company benefits in any way from your interview/probationary period. (Probationary periods are just wrong period IMHO.) Interviewing is a huge burden to most companies, so if your interview questions are entirely synthetic, it's ONLY a cost to the company to interview you, which they should naturally want to minimize on their own. But you know what's even more expensive than interviewing? Dealing with bad hires. So I think a company is within its rights to do it what takes to ensure a quality hire. But they should not gain any benefit from this process - doing so is crossing a line - other than potentially being able to hire you, or failing that, at least make a good impression on you.
  - mywittyname 8y ago
    You're not refuting my point though. I agree they should do what they can to ensure they get a good hire, but I also thing they should do the minimum amount necessary to do such. I've worked on many great teams whose interview process was little more than asking intelligent, pointed questions about previous work experience. Of course, this puts the onus on the interviewer to know what they are doing. I personally keep a list of elementary questions about various technologies for interviewing. So when someone says they've worked with ElasticSearch or Python, I ask them how to do a few rudimentary tasks in a few of them and can pretty quickly tell how much they've been fibbing. I've had companies both accept and reject my hiring recommendations, and every person that's been hired despite my objection has been poor quality. So I know at least anecdotally that it's a viable strategy and it only takes ~30 minutes per person.
mnm1 8y ago
After you've been burned by these tests once or twice, you realize only the dumbest of the dumb would even consider taking such tests. Employers are so disrespectful, most times they won't even look at your submission. Buckets of money my ass. This is free work that often doesn't even get you an in-person interview. Companies that use these tests are really optimizing for the worst engineers, the most desperate, and the ones with the least common business sense and respect for their own time. If these companies could at least be trusted to even consider all submissions, maybe then it might be worth it, but having to do dozens of these tests just to get a regular interview (because no hiring process hires simply off one of these tests) is beyond ridiculous. If a company wants actual work done, they should pay for it. That's the only way to make sure the exchange is fair considering how untrustworthy and uncaring companies are these days. Writing code for a few hours or a few days just to find out the company's not even interested in reading it, is absolutely the stupidest thing I've ever done in my career, a career that has not been a stranger to stupid things at all. In the future, I will use the idea of this type of test to weed out all the people who do not have enough self respect to say no. That's the only proper use of this type of testing.
- newobj 8y ago
  "OK"
ghostbrainalpha 8y ago
I think you make some really good points. But I would add 1 caveat. I'm absolutely willing to lose a couple days for a job interview, if I have a decent chance of getting that job. If a company is asking me to complete an 8 hour test and they have already received 100 qualified applications that have also completed that test, I should know how many people have successfully completed that test. Giving a free 1/2 week of work for a job you have a > 10% chance of getting is very different than being asked for that kind of work for a 1% chance.
131012 8y ago
You can't know for sure that dad/friend/partner didn't write or review the assignment either. How about a 4-5 hours coding rush in the office, where you have to add a few functions or features to an existing codebase?
- newobj 8y ago
  > You can't know for sure that dad/friend/partner didn't write the assignment either. I don't follow what you're implying here, sorry? > How about a 4-5 hours coding rush in the office, where you have to add a few functions or features to an existing codebase? I work at a company where we actively keep a small set of tasks groomed for new hires. It's extremely difficult to keep a set of meaningful actually-in-the-codebase problems groomed at all times and totally infeasible that the person will spend less than a day coming up to speed on the infrastructure etc. The overhead of doing that is really prohibitive from an interview perspective. I do think that for the most part, the coding problems need to be synthetic, then, not an active need in your codebase. I am definitely a believer in longer more open-ended coding challenges than 45 minute white board jams though.
  - trowawee 8y ago
    The best option I've seen were recently-solved small problems. We would roll back a few commits, take that code into the room with the candidate, and pair-program a solution or partial solution in a fairly tightly-scoped time period, and then review the solution with another interviewer. That way, we've got an idea of what to work towards, usually still a pretty solid sense of where the problem exists in the context of the overall app, and we hit a couple of crucial skillsets - collaborating on a project, reviewing code. It wasn't perfect, but it worked reasonably well.
  - newobj 8y ago
    to trowawee: if it works for you, by all means! my only objection would be if the company is benefiting from your work in some way.
    - trowawee 8y ago
gorgonical 8y ago
I'm guessing, but I'll guess that you live somewhere on the coast. I work in research and I make a very good salary in my city, but I only make ~65k/year. My roommate, with many more years of experience, makes 70k/year, and the only people at his company that make more are the senior architects and executives. As is quite normal in this industry, both of us occasionally have to put in large amounts of unpaid overtime in order to make deadlines. That doesn't translate into more money or career fulfilment for us, because the city we live in has a very low ceiling for this sort of thing. Not everyone lives in LA, SFA, or NYC.
- newobj 8y ago
  I'm assuming because the discussion is around coding assignment interview, it's limited to developers. Are you a /developer/ working in research?
geebee 8y ago
That last line was a tad overdramatic. Happy to discuss this, though (and i assure without any downmodding!) I disagree with you in part. One issue is the amount of time required early in the process. A whole day of whiteboard exercisis plus prep time is a lot to ask wheon only, say, 4% of the people who go through it are offered a position. Keep in mind that unlike the bar exam or med boards, devs go through this every time they apply. This pushes a tremendous inefficiency out onto the field and almost certainly deters people fromapplyingfor jobs at all. Which brings me to my next point- who is doing the majority of the complaining? Tech companies are constantly bemoaning the shortage of good developers. Im ok with a company not hiring me because i wont spend 40 hours on their unpaid homework assignment or exam. Seems they need to accept that just as i may not be hired, they may not do any hiring, and their own processes are the reason.
- kraigie 8y ago
  They also never mention the salary level they can't pay people at which is odd. In a shortage that's the first thing you'd want to advertise (as it would encourage more people to enter the industry) it's almost like they can't find good developers for cheap.
haskellandchill 8y ago
> $300k, $400k+ a year Amazon, Facebook, Google? Those are hard salaries to get in my experience. I'm reasonably well respected in my field; attending conferences, speaking, leading meetups, and tirelessly researching computer science in my free time. Can't get a job at those 3, but going to try and take the hedge fund route I guess (I'm in NYC).
- newobj 8y ago
  In my head financial stuff is harder to get into than BigCo's... :) Why do you say you /can't/ get a job at those companies?
  - user5994461 8y ago
    It's all about location. Web is the west coast while finance is the east coast.
    - newobj 8y ago
      Let me put it this way, people that came to BigCo's from FinCo's in my experience (I mean, trading/quant, not banking software) generally were 90th percentile+ performers at BigCo's. Don't know about the other direction.
      - user5994461 8y ago
        It's the same in both directions. It's very visible in London where all companies are in the same locations and people transfer back and forth.
  - haskellandchill 8y ago
    When I pass the tech interview I fail leadership, when I pass the leadership I fail tech. Kind of amusing. Amazon and Facebook are still interested in me but I'm not interested in studying algorithms for them again for a while. I like studying algorithms but am more interested in specific algorithms at the moment, not random undergraduate ones. Google has me on the 3 strikes list.
bassman9000 8y ago
These are objective measures on a set of borderline "well known" problems Risking downvotes is having to remind you to read TFA, where they address the "objetive measure". Hint: they're not.
heyoni 8y ago
Have you ever had to do homework as part of a job application? I ask because in my experience, the companies asking for these tend to be a bit shady. For instance, one company asked me to do this extract/load to Spark and analyze data thing. I did it because their e-mail said that they would reply to each individual with feedback. Guess what? 3 weeks later I get a canned response! Another job assignment took me 4 days but landed me an interview that went really well and gave me a chance to talk about my code one-on-one with a real profession (I consider myself a newish developer). After the second interview, I'm told I almost definitely got the job and that the position pays a whopping $15/hour in NYC. Right now if you offered me coding work for $15/hour, I would probably take it and be quite happy for a while...but if you put me through the wringer like that, make me explain all 500 lines of codes for 3 1/2 hours after I spent the entire work-week bootstrapping your next project, I expect you to at least negotiate around the minimum salary I wrote about on my my resume! And if you're going to flat-out reject me, that's fine but at least offer me feedback on my application or code! I really enjoyed doing the coding exercises, it forced me to consider things I wouldn't think about when coding for myself. But I have to say, the whole thing is making me a little wary of companies that do this. I'm not saying I should have a job but a little reciprocity and honesty goes a long way. PS: I'm a contrarian so I upvoted your rant.
- newobj 8y ago
  Yes, for example, I spent two days implementing a typeahead search results system for Etsy, including writing my own ingestion pipeline, map-reduce framework, index builder, and request processor. Of course Etsy already had their own stuff, this was just a toy done in Java. It was fun. Got offered the job but didn't take it for personal reasons that cropped up concurrent w/ the interview process.
  - heyoni 8y ago
    Alright it sounds like you're applying for higher caliber workplaces, whereas I'm operating somewhere around the junior/mid-level. My feeling is that the article rings more true the lower you are in the foodchain. I'm guessing Etsy didn't offer you $15/hour, right? :)
  - 8y ago
gdilla 8y ago
i agree with you. it's a two way street. pay people if you want them to produce some product that takes more time than the interview.
abandonliberty 8y ago
Does it have to be a day? Multiple days? I limit case work to 2 hours, on something we've already solved. Too many of these interviews apparently seek free labor and ideas. What's really simulated by going off and building something on your own start to finish? You miss out on all the collaborative skills required to ensure you're writing the right code. If you only care about hiring programming, motherfucker (google it) then by all means.
leepowers 8y ago
I agree the investment of time is worth it when you have a strong expectation of landing a high-paying job. That's one caveat to consider. Another: as long as the take-home test comes _later_ in the process, after a more traditional interview, when the company and interviewee have had a chance to evaluate each other.
- newobj 8y ago
  Agreed, absolutely.
ggggtez 8y ago
The whole point is that these people DO make $100-$400k+. At the high range, that's $1000 for a day of work. Imagine asking someone "Hi, please give me $1000 application fee for this job." With a whiteboard interview, at least you get to talk to the engineers directly. You could argue a company that is willing to spend it's engineer's time doing hiring is spending more than you are, which is not true for a homework assignment.
- newobj 8y ago
  I would never take a job, or even interview for a job, where I wasn't also able to effectively interview the company and team. That's just stupid. My rant is more about an otherwise normal interview, which has in-person coding, and possibly longer at-home demonstrations of work.
- Clubber 8y ago
  That's the "anyone can win the lottery" fallacy. The vast, vast majority of people doing that crap pay 'market rates.'
s73v3r_ 8y ago
1. You're forgetting that the candidate has to do this for just about every single job they're applying for. You're also forgetting that they likely have to do this while doing their normal day job. 2. You mention the money. Tell me, what is the exact dollar amount that one has to make before they have to stop complaining about this?
ThrustVectoring 8y ago
The reason the take-home assignment is unfair isn't because of a lack of objectivity. The unfairness is that it allows employers to make candidates spend proportionally more of the time, money, and effort required to generate signal from noise. Companies that are that aggressive at cost-cutting at your expense are also likely to have other strategies - say, giving the coding assignment to almost anyone and dropping the top 95% by salary requirement. The short of it is that it's a candidate-unfriendly measure, and in my experience has been correlated with having other red flags.
YZF 8y ago
The homework doesn't get you the job though. You may need to go through 10 of those to find someone who wants to hire you and you also wanna work for them. Let's say you're currently employed, where are you gonna find those 10 weeks? Minuscule one-time effort? You never switch jobs? There are lots of professions that make just as much or more as your average software developer. Accountants, sales people, bankers, lawyers, dentists, managers ... the list goes on. Software developers are middle class (or at least what's left of it). Is the homework a strong enough signal? What if someone helped the candidate? What if they won't get along with the team or the culture? How close is it to the real work the candidate would be doing? I wouldn't base a hiring decision on homework. So this is basically just a screen, a very expensive (to the candidate) screen. Who are you screening? Anyone good enough that doesn't need to invest a week to get a job, that's for sure. If you feel homework is a good indicator and you ask someone to do that for you, pay them. $200/hr sounds like a good starting price.
- meesterdude 8y ago
  > You may need to go through 10 of those to find someone who wants to hire you and you also wanna work for them. I am pushing 100. Man, if one of the first 10 I did panned out that would have been awesome!
ashelmire 8y ago
Your post assumes that programmers are always applying for well paying jobs at great companies and have a great chance at any position they do this homework for. Realistically, there are 50-100 people applying for every position in the US, many of whom are qualified. So 50 devs are going to do a day of homework, doing two months of collective work? And then you have to do it again for every other job you apply for? Get outta here!
bayonetz 8y ago
What is unreal is that these homework assignments don't get the job, they get an interview. The interview is then still the standard whiteboard coding and system design sessions. If passing take home meant getting the job, it would be more palatable. In the end, these companies suck at developing reliable evaluation instruments and it shows in how they don't trust the homework assignment to hire on its own.
arwhatever 8y ago
There ought to be a formally-named logical fallacy for the "we shouldn't attempt to fix this problem, because someone somewhere else has it worse than we do" attitude.

by newobj 8y ago

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.
- user5994461 8y ago
  There are developers who went through a master or PhD at a top school, with a similar difficulty and debt to medical school. There are companies who will only hire you if you got a degree and relevant experience. The big tech companies never mention it but most of the workforce had a long education.
  - gms7777 8y ago
    Master's and PhDs in CS are typically not focused primarily on coding skills though. These individuals have a degree and publications that speak primarily to their conceptual expertise, which is important and significant but if the job they're interested in is mostly coding, that's an entirely separate skill. I know CS PhDs who didn't write a single line of code for their thesis. Going back to the medical analogy, just because someone has a medical degree doesn't mean they're a good surgeon. They'd need additional certification to prove their surgery skills.
  - newobj 8y ago
    I've never seen post-grad requirement for a dev unless it's a cutting edge research position and they need PhD's from the problem domain. Requiring a master's for a dev position is just a joke and I wouldn't take a company seriously that was asking that. Above not true for roles like PM, where for better or worse an MBA carries weight.
    - user5994461 8y ago
      >>> I've never seen post-grad requirement for a dev unless it's a cutting edge research position and they need PhD's from the problem domain. I've seen it in almost every place I worked for in London. The floor is either only people with degrees or only people with no degrees. The degree is never announced as a requirement, it's rather selected automatically during the interview. For instance in programming, some questions about state machines and graph traversal will do a wonderful filter.
newobj 8y ago
Imagine a nurse that failed to properly take vitals during an interview
- Clubber 8y ago
  A more similar analogy to the practices that go on in tech, it would be asking the nurse to take vitals on a cadaver. It would never happen real world, but "there are so many frauds out there, this is what we came up with. You should now how to take vitals."
rahimnathwani 8y ago
People have to go through exams and other assessment before they can put the title on their CV. They've been tested multiple times on their ability to 'take vitals' and other basic parts of their job. Anyone can call themselves a software engineer, even if no one has ever tested their ability to reverse a linked list, or solve fizz buzz, or even write 'hello world' in a language of their choice.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
Arzh 8y ago
Cooks do a stage after a phone / in-person interview where they work in the restaurant for a day or so (multiple days if they are expected to work with different people). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stage_(cooking) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stage_(cooking)
- sampleinajar 8y ago
  Yes. As a former cook, it's only the high end jobs that do this, not the chain restaurants. I think that is some of the problem with our industry, imagine if Applebee's started doing this because The French Laundry does? But, I think that this example is a good one, because even a chef with 20+ years has to demonstrate their abilities in an interview. Where should that line be in our industry?
  - Arzh 8y ago
    Sure but with what even a low end programming job pays I would put it in the "high end" job spectrum.
edanm 8y ago
Many fields not only have extensive education requirements, like law school for example, but May have mandatory internships at low wages for several years. This kind of comment is exactly the kind of thing that makes some people think that software developers have no idea just how good they have it.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

incredible12345 8y ago

Many programmers make nowhere near $100k and so many programmers do a ton of extra unpaid work; and week-long interview preparations are just one of them. Just last night, a fellow programmer I know is being forced into "mandatory unpaid overtime" for the purposes of learning new things for his company. He has to learn more crap, together with coworkers, in his own 'freetime', regularly, unpaid. And I can tell you he makes nowhere near 100k living near a large city. That may be his problem for, but if the popularity of companies having "mandatory unpaid work" AKA slavery increases we will all feel these things even more so. That being said, I can't think of anything more viable than actually testing the programmer in question with code. I would personally give them a computer and have them do it right there on the spot in the interview but that is just me.

newobj 8y ago
The problem with your friend's situation is not a bad interview process, it's that they're being taken advantage of, and for some reason not improving their own situation, in a market where a good candidate is calling the shots on the terms of their employment.
- ryandrake 8y ago
  99.9% of candidates are not calling any shots in this employer’s market. Unless you are a celebrity, widely known as a top candidate, the employer is pretty much going to be dictating the interview process, the job description, the compensation, and the terms of employment. If this were an actual employee‘s market, the friend might not be so underemployed.
  - Torn 8y ago
    Software is 100% an employees market. Everyone wants coders, and can be hard to pin down good ones. I think software engineers either don't know what they are worth, or are uncomfortable negotiating comp.
    - jonhendry18 8y ago

magissima 8y ago

If you're only applying to one job and you get it, sure. But when you're looking for a new job and sending out dozens of resumes, it adds up pretty quickly! On top of that, it makes rejections all the more dispiriting when you spend hours or days working on one job application.

newobj 8y ago
IMHO, if you can't land, say, 1 out of 3 interviews, there is a systemic personal problem, not just a bad day, and "the problem is u" -- sadly you will just need to work harder because something in your skill set is not up to snuff.
- rahimnathwani 8y ago
  This ratio depends on how ambitious you are on upgrading from your current position. Imagine arranging all open jobs into layers. At the lower layers are jobs that you can do with your eyes closed. Towards the middle are jobs you're sure you could do, but would take some ramping up. Higher up are jobs that might be more rewarding, and you think you have decent chance of doing them well if you work hard to improve your skills once you're in. Your 1:3 odds will be different depending on your target. Maybe the commenter to whom you replied is trying to get jobs paying 50% more than their current job, but for each of these jobs there's only a 3% chance of getting it.
  - newobj 8y ago
    Fair enough. I wrote my comment assuming lateral or slightly upward movement, not a level skip, which I personally would never try to do between jobs, unless it was moving from a little fish in a big pond to a big fish in a little pond type situation.
- magissima 8y ago
  Thanks for clarifying that your opinion was humble while insulting me. I was thinking of when I was getting my first job out of school, when I did three final interviews and landed one. The thing with the homework is that it typically comes well before the final interview and often even a phone interview. Often it would be the very first step in the process. I only had one application require a substantial (say, 4+ hours) amount of homework, but I had a lot more give 2 to 3 hour assignments. That was annoying, but considering I was unemployed and job searching full-time, it was manageable. If it becomes more common, as seems to be happening, it'll absolutely become an issue for anyone who has to do more than a couple of job applications, which probably includes most people trying to move up in position or relocate.

mywittyname 8y ago

Personally, I think it's fine to expect employers to verify a candidates skills. But they should also limit their verification to the minimum amount necessary. People are just arguing where that line should be drawn. Whether it's hours, days, or months of verification. Some careers do require months of unpaid internships in order to get jobs. And it's not because it takes months to verify a person's ability, but because companies will do anything they can to pay people as little as possible for their work.

newobj 8y ago
It's wrong if the company benefits in any way from your interview/probationary period. (Probationary periods are just wrong period IMHO.) Interviewing is a huge burden to most companies, so if your interview questions are entirely synthetic, it's ONLY a cost to the company to interview you, which they should naturally want to minimize on their own. But you know what's even more expensive than interviewing? Dealing with bad hires. So I think a company is within its rights to do it what takes to ensure a quality hire. But they should not gain any benefit from this process - doing so is crossing a line - other than potentially being able to hire you, or failing that, at least make a good impression on you.
- mywittyname 8y ago
  You're not refuting my point though. I agree they should do what they can to ensure they get a good hire, but I also thing they should do the minimum amount necessary to do such. I've worked on many great teams whose interview process was little more than asking intelligent, pointed questions about previous work experience. Of course, this puts the onus on the interviewer to know what they are doing. I personally keep a list of elementary questions about various technologies for interviewing. So when someone says they've worked with ElasticSearch or Python, I ask them how to do a few rudimentary tasks in a few of them and can pretty quickly tell how much they've been fibbing. I've had companies both accept and reject my hiring recommendations, and every person that's been hired despite my objection has been poor quality. So I know at least anecdotally that it's a viable strategy and it only takes ~30 minutes per person.

mnm1 8y ago

After you've been burned by these tests once or twice, you realize only the dumbest of the dumb would even consider taking such tests. Employers are so disrespectful, most times they won't even look at your submission. Buckets of money my ass. This is free work that often doesn't even get you an in-person interview. Companies that use these tests are really optimizing for the worst engineers, the most desperate, and the ones with the least common business sense and respect for their own time. If these companies could at least be trusted to even consider all submissions, maybe then it might be worth it, but having to do dozens of these tests just to get a regular interview (because no hiring process hires simply off one of these tests) is beyond ridiculous. If a company wants actual work done, they should pay for it. That's the only way to make sure the exchange is fair considering how untrustworthy and uncaring companies are these days. Writing code for a few hours or a few days just to find out the company's not even interested in reading it, is absolutely the stupidest thing I've ever done in my career, a career that has not been a stranger to stupid things at all. In the future, I will use the idea of this type of test to weed out all the people who do not have enough self respect to say no. That's the only proper use of this type of testing.

newobj 8y ago
"OK"

ghostbrainalpha 8y ago

I think you make some really good points. But I would add 1 caveat. I'm absolutely willing to lose a couple days for a job interview, if I have a decent chance of getting that job. If a company is asking me to complete an 8 hour test and they have already received 100 qualified applications that have also completed that test, I should know how many people have successfully completed that test. Giving a free 1/2 week of work for a job you have a > 10% chance of getting is very different than being asked for that kind of work for a 1% chance.

131012 8y ago

You can't know for sure that dad/friend/partner didn't write or review the assignment either. How about a 4-5 hours coding rush in the office, where you have to add a few functions or features to an existing codebase?

newobj 8y ago
> You can't know for sure that dad/friend/partner didn't write the assignment either. I don't follow what you're implying here, sorry? > How about a 4-5 hours coding rush in the office, where you have to add a few functions or features to an existing codebase? I work at a company where we actively keep a small set of tasks groomed for new hires. It's extremely difficult to keep a set of meaningful actually-in-the-codebase problems groomed at all times and totally infeasible that the person will spend less than a day coming up to speed on the infrastructure etc. The overhead of doing that is really prohibitive from an interview perspective. I do think that for the most part, the coding problems need to be synthetic, then, not an active need in your codebase. I am definitely a believer in longer more open-ended coding challenges than 45 minute white board jams though.
- trowawee 8y ago
  The best option I've seen were recently-solved small problems. We would roll back a few commits, take that code into the room with the candidate, and pair-program a solution or partial solution in a fairly tightly-scoped time period, and then review the solution with another interviewer. That way, we've got an idea of what to work towards, usually still a pretty solid sense of where the problem exists in the context of the overall app, and we hit a couple of crucial skillsets - collaborating on a project, reviewing code. It wasn't perfect, but it worked reasonably well.
- newobj 8y ago
  to trowawee: if it works for you, by all means! my only objection would be if the company is benefiting from your work in some way.
  - trowawee 8y ago

gorgonical 8y ago

I'm guessing, but I'll guess that you live somewhere on the coast. I work in research and I make a very good salary in my city, but I only make ~65k/year. My roommate, with many more years of experience, makes 70k/year, and the only people at his company that make more are the senior architects and executives. As is quite normal in this industry, both of us occasionally have to put in large amounts of unpaid overtime in order to make deadlines. That doesn't translate into more money or career fulfilment for us, because the city we live in has a very low ceiling for this sort of thing. Not everyone lives in LA, SFA, or NYC.

newobj 8y ago
I'm assuming because the discussion is around coding assignment interview, it's limited to developers. Are you a /developer/ working in research?

geebee 8y ago

That last line was a tad overdramatic. Happy to discuss this, though (and i assure without any downmodding!) I disagree with you in part. One issue is the amount of time required early in the process. A whole day of whiteboard exercisis plus prep time is a lot to ask wheon only, say, 4% of the people who go through it are offered a position. Keep in mind that unlike the bar exam or med boards, devs go through this every time they apply. This pushes a tremendous inefficiency out onto the field and almost certainly deters people fromapplyingfor jobs at all. Which brings me to my next point- who is doing the majority of the complaining? Tech companies are constantly bemoaning the shortage of good developers. Im ok with a company not hiring me because i wont spend 40 hours on their unpaid homework assignment or exam. Seems they need to accept that just as i may not be hired, they may not do any hiring, and their own processes are the reason.

kraigie 8y ago
They also never mention the salary level they can't pay people at which is odd. In a shortage that's the first thing you'd want to advertise (as it would encourage more people to enter the industry) it's almost like they can't find good developers for cheap.

haskellandchill 8y ago

> $300k, $400k+ a year Amazon, Facebook, Google? Those are hard salaries to get in my experience. I'm reasonably well respected in my field; attending conferences, speaking, leading meetups, and tirelessly researching computer science in my free time. Can't get a job at those 3, but going to try and take the hedge fund route I guess (I'm in NYC).

newobj 8y ago
In my head financial stuff is harder to get into than BigCo's... :) Why do you say you /can't/ get a job at those companies?
- user5994461 8y ago
  It's all about location. Web is the west coast while finance is the east coast.
  - newobj 8y ago
    Let me put it this way, people that came to BigCo's from FinCo's in my experience (I mean, trading/quant, not banking software) generally were 90th percentile+ performers at BigCo's. Don't know about the other direction.
    - user5994461 8y ago
      It's the same in both directions. It's very visible in London where all companies are in the same locations and people transfer back and forth.
- haskellandchill 8y ago
  When I pass the tech interview I fail leadership, when I pass the leadership I fail tech. Kind of amusing. Amazon and Facebook are still interested in me but I'm not interested in studying algorithms for them again for a while. I like studying algorithms but am more interested in specific algorithms at the moment, not random undergraduate ones. Google has me on the 3 strikes list.

bassman9000 8y ago

These are objective measures on a set of borderline "well known" problems Risking downvotes is having to remind you to read TFA, where they address the "objetive measure". Hint: they're not.

heyoni 8y ago

Have you ever had to do homework as part of a job application? I ask because in my experience, the companies asking for these tend to be a bit shady. For instance, one company asked me to do this extract/load to Spark and analyze data thing. I did it because their e-mail said that they would reply to each individual with feedback. Guess what? 3 weeks later I get a canned response! Another job assignment took me 4 days but landed me an interview that went really well and gave me a chance to talk about my code one-on-one with a real profession (I consider myself a newish developer). After the second interview, I'm told I almost definitely got the job and that the position pays a whopping $15/hour in NYC. Right now if you offered me coding work for $15/hour, I would probably take it and be quite happy for a while...but if you put me through the wringer like that, make me explain all 500 lines of codes for 3 1/2 hours after I spent the entire work-week bootstrapping your next project, I expect you to at least negotiate around the minimum salary I wrote about on my my resume! And if you're going to flat-out reject me, that's fine but at least offer me feedback on my application or code! I really enjoyed doing the coding exercises, it forced me to consider things I wouldn't think about when coding for myself. But I have to say, the whole thing is making me a little wary of companies that do this. I'm not saying I should have a job but a little reciprocity and honesty goes a long way. PS: I'm a contrarian so I upvoted your rant.

newobj 8y ago
Yes, for example, I spent two days implementing a typeahead search results system for Etsy, including writing my own ingestion pipeline, map-reduce framework, index builder, and request processor. Of course Etsy already had their own stuff, this was just a toy done in Java. It was fun. Got offered the job but didn't take it for personal reasons that cropped up concurrent w/ the interview process.
- heyoni 8y ago
  Alright it sounds like you're applying for higher caliber workplaces, whereas I'm operating somewhere around the junior/mid-level. My feeling is that the article rings more true the lower you are in the foodchain. I'm guessing Etsy didn't offer you $15/hour, right? :)
- 8y ago

gdilla 8y ago

i agree with you. it's a two way street. pay people if you want them to produce some product that takes more time than the interview.

abandonliberty 8y ago

Does it have to be a day? Multiple days? I limit case work to 2 hours, on something we've already solved. Too many of these interviews apparently seek free labor and ideas. What's really simulated by going off and building something on your own start to finish? You miss out on all the collaborative skills required to ensure you're writing the right code. If you only care about hiring programming, motherfucker (google it) then by all means.

leepowers 8y ago

I agree the investment of time is worth it when you have a strong expectation of landing a high-paying job. That's one caveat to consider. Another: as long as the take-home test comes _later_ in the process, after a more traditional interview, when the company and interviewee have had a chance to evaluate each other.

newobj 8y ago
Agreed, absolutely.

ggggtez 8y ago

The whole point is that these people DO make $100-$400k+. At the high range, that's $1000 for a day of work. Imagine asking someone "Hi, please give me $1000 application fee for this job." With a whiteboard interview, at least you get to talk to the engineers directly. You could argue a company that is willing to spend it's engineer's time doing hiring is spending more than you are, which is not true for a homework assignment.

newobj 8y ago
I would never take a job, or even interview for a job, where I wasn't also able to effectively interview the company and team. That's just stupid. My rant is more about an otherwise normal interview, which has in-person coding, and possibly longer at-home demonstrations of work.
Clubber 8y ago
That's the "anyone can win the lottery" fallacy. The vast, vast majority of people doing that crap pay 'market rates.'

s73v3r_ 8y ago

1. You're forgetting that the candidate has to do this for just about every single job they're applying for. You're also forgetting that they likely have to do this while doing their normal day job. 2. You mention the money. Tell me, what is the exact dollar amount that one has to make before they have to stop complaining about this?

ThrustVectoring 8y ago

The reason the take-home assignment is unfair isn't because of a lack of objectivity. The unfairness is that it allows employers to make candidates spend proportionally more of the time, money, and effort required to generate signal from noise. Companies that are that aggressive at cost-cutting at your expense are also likely to have other strategies - say, giving the coding assignment to almost anyone and dropping the top 95% by salary requirement. The short of it is that it's a candidate-unfriendly measure, and in my experience has been correlated with having other red flags.

YZF 8y ago

The homework doesn't get you the job though. You may need to go through 10 of those to find someone who wants to hire you and you also wanna work for them. Let's say you're currently employed, where are you gonna find those 10 weeks? Minuscule one-time effort? You never switch jobs? There are lots of professions that make just as much or more as your average software developer. Accountants, sales people, bankers, lawyers, dentists, managers ... the list goes on. Software developers are middle class (or at least what's left of it). Is the homework a strong enough signal? What if someone helped the candidate? What if they won't get along with the team or the culture? How close is it to the real work the candidate would be doing? I wouldn't base a hiring decision on homework. So this is basically just a screen, a very expensive (to the candidate) screen. Who are you screening? Anyone good enough that doesn't need to invest a week to get a job, that's for sure. If you feel homework is a good indicator and you ask someone to do that for you, pay them. $200/hr sounds like a good starting price.

meesterdude 8y ago
> You may need to go through 10 of those to find someone who wants to hire you and you also wanna work for them. I am pushing 100. Man, if one of the first 10 I did panned out that would have been awesome!

ashelmire 8y ago

Your post assumes that programmers are always applying for well paying jobs at great companies and have a great chance at any position they do this homework for. Realistically, there are 50-100 people applying for every position in the US, many of whom are qualified. So 50 devs are going to do a day of homework, doing two months of collective work? And then you have to do it again for every other job you apply for? Get outta here!

bayonetz 8y ago

What is unreal is that these homework assignments don't get the job, they get an interview. The interview is then still the standard whiteboard coding and system design sessions. If passing take home meant getting the job, it would be more palatable. In the end, these companies suck at developing reliable evaluation instruments and it shows in how they don't trust the homework assignment to hire on its own.

arwhatever 8y ago

There ought to be a formally-named logical fallacy for the "we shouldn't attempt to fix this problem, because someone somewhere else has it worse than we do" attitude.