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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 unem

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.

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.