5 ms·

I really don't like take-home assignments. It's a one-sided time investment. If I'm asked to do one I say that I'm only prepared to put in 45 minutes on it. Now

I really don't like take-home assignments. It's a one-sided time investment. If I'm asked to do one I say that I'm only prepared to put in 45 minutes on it. Now that I've done this a few times and subsequently been rejected after submitting, I'm leaning towards rejecting assignments altogether. It doesn't really serve me well in job searching but I feel strongly about it. It's a bad investment on my time and the assignments never asses things I'm actually good at.

jehlakj 9y ago
They’re also unfair because different candidates have different schedules. One may even be on vacation that day.
- r00fus 9y ago
  I'd expect that interviewee to request reschedule then. Isn't that the job of the recruiter to manage the interview process and ensure that requirements like this are being met?
  - ihsw2 9y ago
    Only if they care enough. Given the volume of applicants, they're incentivized to sift out applicants that don't adhere to the process.
seanmcdirmid 9y ago
Not a take home assignment, just prep material. Like saying, we will ask you about X, Y, and Z, here are some pointers. I would just worry the night before anyways, might as well put my anxiety at ease by prepping and building confidence.
- rojobuffalo 9y ago
  Oh I see. Prep material would be great.
ljw1001 9y ago
exactly. If the job and the pay were exceptional, sure. But today it's standard practice for average companies. One company I interviewed with gave me a program that had to be written in Scala, with the full knowledge that I would have to learn Scala to do it. Please.
qaq 9y ago
It's highly personal preference I do much better on take home vs live code on the board in front of N people you never met before.
reaperducer 9y ago
Take-home assignments are a great way to filter out women, the sick, and the poor, but make it look totally above board. "The IT industry is committed to increasing the number of women engineers. But if they're too busy caring for their children to spend six hours doing our silly test, that's their fault for being women. We are forced to hire 20-something white males who have nothing better to do with their time."
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  There are us guys who are involved in toddler care also (like me, since my wife is working instead). Anecdotally, my wife failed in all her in person interviews until she got one with a substantial take home assignment. She got an offer for that job easily, above what she was looking for. For her at least, this worked out better for her. She does design, which is even more difficult to evaluate in 30 minute time slots. Not that I’m arguing this is the way to go, I was just wondering if interviewers could give some hints on what they would cover I the interview, so we could prep like studying for a test.
- lliamander 8y ago
  > Take-home assignments are a great way to filter out women, the sick, and the poor, but make it look totally above board. I hope your not impugning the motives of those who issue take-home assignments. Existing practices for hiring are objectively bad at selecting qualified candidates, and most people are just trying to do better. There is some evidence that take-home assignments are an improvement above the norm. Also, consider that such assignments can serve as a "blind-audition" and can help eliminate bias from the interviewing process. And there are lots of ways in which loading everything into the interview unfairly penalizes certain types of otherwise qualified candidates. What's left, referrals? That's definitely biased, even if it also tends to have a lower false positive rate.
  - jonathankoren 8y ago
    Motives are mostly irrelevant, if the effect is the same. An easy switch would be to convert take homes to onsite work. One of the more recent interviews I had consisted of putting me in a room with some data and a stub of code and asked me to fill in the stub over a few hours. Every so often, they’d come by and ask if there were any problems. (More frequently at first, and then later less frequently.) It’s basically the same, but it’s timeboxed and well defined with enough back and forth, to not feel like they’re just throwing a problem over the wall to you.
boyter 9y ago
Same. Now that I am on the other side I send out a short piece of code and ask the person to point out all the errors in it. There are about 20. It takes about 5-10 minutes of the candidates time and I have had a lot of success with it.
- rojobuffalo 8y ago
  That's a unique approach or at least one that I haven't encountered. I like it.
- cableshaft 8y ago
  Really wish more interviews were like this. My favorite onsite interview was when the interviewer printed out a class from the actual system I'd be working on (as I verified for myself later), asked me to figure out what it did, any errors I found, and a few ideas to improve or refactor it. Then he took my code sample and asked me to describe what it did as well. After that he said "Okay, I know you know enough to handle the job, now I'm curious how much you really know. " (This is key, I feel. He specified I wasn't going to get dinged for not knowing the answers, so I didn't feel the pressure in the questions he asked afterwards, when I usually feel intense pressure, as I know I've been passed over for getting a single question wrong in multiple interviews in the past.) He then asked me some pretty deep questions about low level memory and other things, and if I said I didn't know he turned into teacher mode and taught me the concept. I actually walked out of that interview having learned something new and useful. I then got to chat with the President very casually, and I received a job offer a few days later. The interviewer new his stuff, too. He'd been programming arcade games in assembly for decades. His games have sold millions of dollars, and two of the series still get made today. Ever since, I figured if a freaking legend could be satisfied after reviewing some code and a code sample, the crap I've had to endure everywhere else is completely and totally unnecessary, and it's just frustrated me to no end.
  - muddyrivers 8y ago
    I had a very similar experience many years ago. It was an start-up. The interviewer was the ex-CTO of a widely used open source project/product, and led the engineering team in the start-up. Although I regarded myself a good engineer, I was pretty nervous. After several questions that he was sure I knew the regular stuffs and was qualified for the job, he said he was going to ask some really hard questions to see how much I really knew and what was my thought process. The questions had no simple answers. Each of them required knowledge and experiences from a few technical fields. I didn't know much then. He guided me how to solve the problems, discussed the pros and cons of each approach. Then he told me how they did it, how other products in the same category did it, etc. The half-hour interview was prolonged to one and a half. At the end, he said, "You have a very intuition on what are the right directions to go when facing unknown complex issues", and gave me an offer. It is my best interview experience. (I didn't join the start-up due to other reasons.) The technologies have been advanced in a blazing fast speed i the last 10 plus years. Technical interviews, on the contrary, regress in a similar speed.
lliamander 9y ago
> ...the assignments never asses things I'm actually good at. I actually really like homework assignment approach when done correctly, both as an interviewer and as an interviewee (though seanmcdirmid's suggestion of prep material, rather than a homework assignment, is quite sound), but this is a separate issue, independent of how skills are assessed. It's really about the company/team having a preconceived notion of what skills they are looking for vs. looking to see if a candidate has a distinctive skillset that could help round-out the team. How do you, as the candidate, market yourself and the things you are good at? Obviously, the resume is a good place to do such marketing (and I'm sure you already are) so if teams are turning down applications based on the homework without looking at the other skills the candidate has to offer, then that might be an issue.
alxndr 8y ago
What about a completely untimed take-home project?
spirodonfl 8y ago
Geez I could not agree more. Not only has it, overall, been a bad investment of time (for myself and others I know around me in the field) but so many companies are unclear in what they're looking for in that test to begin with. I wrote a thing about it and I got someone who responded to me with a rather scathing rebuttal. I don't know, it's very conflicting. Post in case you're interested: https://dev.to/spirodonfl/should-i-accept-coding-challenges-for-a-potential-job-4p2m https://dev.to/spirodonfl/should-i-accept-coding-challenges-...
- collyw 8y ago
  Wow, some real dickheads in the replies there.
  - spirodonfl 8y ago
    It's polarizing. Everyone has their own viewpoint and it feels like that's the viewpoint they cling to and so it becomes personal when you go against it. Something like that, anyways. Edit: better wording
nicoburns 8y ago
I feel like take home assignments waste less of my time than an interview that doesn't properly assess my abilities... They're also fantastic for junior devs who can prove themselves without extensive working history.

jehlakj 9y ago

They’re also unfair because different candidates have different schedules. One may even be on vacation that day.

r00fus 9y ago
I'd expect that interviewee to request reschedule then. Isn't that the job of the recruiter to manage the interview process and ensure that requirements like this are being met?
- ihsw2 9y ago
  Only if they care enough. Given the volume of applicants, they're incentivized to sift out applicants that don't adhere to the process.

seanmcdirmid 9y ago

Not a take home assignment, just prep material. Like saying, we will ask you about X, Y, and Z, here are some pointers. I would just worry the night before anyways, might as well put my anxiety at ease by prepping and building confidence.

rojobuffalo 9y ago
Oh I see. Prep material would be great.

ljw1001 9y ago

exactly. If the job and the pay were exceptional, sure. But today it's standard practice for average companies. One company I interviewed with gave me a program that had to be written in Scala, with the full knowledge that I would have to learn Scala to do it. Please.

qaq 9y ago

It's highly personal preference I do much better on take home vs live code on the board in front of N people you never met before.

reaperducer 9y ago

Take-home assignments are a great way to filter out women, the sick, and the poor, but make it look totally above board. "The IT industry is committed to increasing the number of women engineers. But if they're too busy caring for their children to spend six hours doing our silly test, that's their fault for being women. We are forced to hire 20-something white males who have nothing better to do with their time."

seanmcdirmid 9y ago
There are us guys who are involved in toddler care also (like me, since my wife is working instead). Anecdotally, my wife failed in all her in person interviews until she got one with a substantial take home assignment. She got an offer for that job easily, above what she was looking for. For her at least, this worked out better for her. She does design, which is even more difficult to evaluate in 30 minute time slots. Not that I’m arguing this is the way to go, I was just wondering if interviewers could give some hints on what they would cover I the interview, so we could prep like studying for a test.
lliamander 8y ago
> Take-home assignments are a great way to filter out women, the sick, and the poor, but make it look totally above board. I hope your not impugning the motives of those who issue take-home assignments. Existing practices for hiring are objectively bad at selecting qualified candidates, and most people are just trying to do better. There is some evidence that take-home assignments are an improvement above the norm. Also, consider that such assignments can serve as a "blind-audition" and can help eliminate bias from the interviewing process. And there are lots of ways in which loading everything into the interview unfairly penalizes certain types of otherwise qualified candidates. What's left, referrals? That's definitely biased, even if it also tends to have a lower false positive rate.
- jonathankoren 8y ago
  Motives are mostly irrelevant, if the effect is the same. An easy switch would be to convert take homes to onsite work. One of the more recent interviews I had consisted of putting me in a room with some data and a stub of code and asked me to fill in the stub over a few hours. Every so often, they’d come by and ask if there were any problems. (More frequently at first, and then later less frequently.) It’s basically the same, but it’s timeboxed and well defined with enough back and forth, to not feel like they’re just throwing a problem over the wall to you.

boyter 9y ago

Same. Now that I am on the other side I send out a short piece of code and ask the person to point out all the errors in it. There are about 20. It takes about 5-10 minutes of the candidates time and I have had a lot of success with it.

rojobuffalo 8y ago
That's a unique approach or at least one that I haven't encountered. I like it.
cableshaft 8y ago
Really wish more interviews were like this. My favorite onsite interview was when the interviewer printed out a class from the actual system I'd be working on (as I verified for myself later), asked me to figure out what it did, any errors I found, and a few ideas to improve or refactor it. Then he took my code sample and asked me to describe what it did as well. After that he said "Okay, I know you know enough to handle the job, now I'm curious how much you really know. " (This is key, I feel. He specified I wasn't going to get dinged for not knowing the answers, so I didn't feel the pressure in the questions he asked afterwards, when I usually feel intense pressure, as I know I've been passed over for getting a single question wrong in multiple interviews in the past.) He then asked me some pretty deep questions about low level memory and other things, and if I said I didn't know he turned into teacher mode and taught me the concept. I actually walked out of that interview having learned something new and useful. I then got to chat with the President very casually, and I received a job offer a few days later. The interviewer new his stuff, too. He'd been programming arcade games in assembly for decades. His games have sold millions of dollars, and two of the series still get made today. Ever since, I figured if a freaking legend could be satisfied after reviewing some code and a code sample, the crap I've had to endure everywhere else is completely and totally unnecessary, and it's just frustrated me to no end.
- muddyrivers 8y ago
  I had a very similar experience many years ago. It was an start-up. The interviewer was the ex-CTO of a widely used open source project/product, and led the engineering team in the start-up. Although I regarded myself a good engineer, I was pretty nervous. After several questions that he was sure I knew the regular stuffs and was qualified for the job, he said he was going to ask some really hard questions to see how much I really knew and what was my thought process. The questions had no simple answers. Each of them required knowledge and experiences from a few technical fields. I didn't know much then. He guided me how to solve the problems, discussed the pros and cons of each approach. Then he told me how they did it, how other products in the same category did it, etc. The half-hour interview was prolonged to one and a half. At the end, he said, "You have a very intuition on what are the right directions to go when facing unknown complex issues", and gave me an offer. It is my best interview experience. (I didn't join the start-up due to other reasons.) The technologies have been advanced in a blazing fast speed i the last 10 plus years. Technical interviews, on the contrary, regress in a similar speed.

lliamander 9y ago

> ...the assignments never asses things I'm actually good at. I actually really like homework assignment approach when done correctly, both as an interviewer and as an interviewee (though seanmcdirmid's suggestion of prep material, rather than a homework assignment, is quite sound), but this is a separate issue, independent of how skills are assessed. It's really about the company/team having a preconceived notion of what skills they are looking for vs. looking to see if a candidate has a distinctive skillset that could help round-out the team. How do you, as the candidate, market yourself and the things you are good at? Obviously, the resume is a good place to do such marketing (and I'm sure you already are) so if teams are turning down applications based on the homework without looking at the other skills the candidate has to offer, then that might be an issue.

alxndr 8y ago

What about a completely untimed take-home project?

spirodonfl 8y ago

Geez I could not agree more. Not only has it, overall, been a bad investment of time (for myself and others I know around me in the field) but so many companies are unclear in what they're looking for in that test to begin with. I wrote a thing about it and I got someone who responded to me with a rather scathing rebuttal. I don't know, it's very conflicting. Post in case you're interested: https://dev.to/spirodonfl/should-i-accept-coding-challenges-for-a-potential-job-4p2m https://dev.to/spirodonfl/should-i-accept-coding-challenges-...

collyw 8y ago
Wow, some real dickheads in the replies there.
- spirodonfl 8y ago
  It's polarizing. Everyone has their own viewpoint and it feels like that's the viewpoint they cling to and so it becomes personal when you go against it. Something like that, anyways. Edit: better wording

nicoburns 8y ago

I feel like take home assignments waste less of my time than an interview that doesn't properly assess my abilities... They're also fantastic for junior devs who can prove themselves without extensive working history.