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>Candidates spend many hours completing homework assignments for companies which are not sufficiently interested in them. This is abusing candidates. Knock it o

>Candidates spend many hours completing homework assignments for companies which are not sufficiently interested in them. This is abusing candidates. Knock it off. Given a choice of spending 2-3 hours on a take home assignment vs. 1 hour of writing code on a whiteboard in front of 3 or more developers, I'd choose the former any day. It's not even close. The author is taking one end of the spectrum and painting it as an endemic problem. It's not that. edit: my strong preference for homework vs whiteboarding is because that's how I've solved problems and accomplished tasks for years. Whiteboarding to "see how I think" is not at all how I would think if I were work for them.

murukesh_s 8y ago
>Whiteboarding to "see how I think" is not at all how I would think if I were work for them Someone nailed it finally
decebalus1 8y ago
I completely agree with that. However, at least in my experience, the take home assignment was used to replace one or all the phone screens. So it was always an elimination round until getting to the whiteboarding sessions. I would especially like to call out Uber on that as a couple of years ago they wanted me to write some local public transportation service endpoint integrated with Google maps in order to get to the onsite interview. Told them I don't have time for that with my full time job and they just shrugged and were like 'ok, no worries, we look forward to seeing you on X'. So I guess it was also a sucker elimination round.
sytelus 8y ago
The problem is effort asymmetry. For in-person interviews, company must spend as much time as candidate is spending in evaluation. If homework thing becomes standard, I'm afraid that will become first line of filtering because it doesn't cost much to company. So you will still get in-person interview and may be even bit of whiteboarding (to make sure your friend didn't took test for you or somehow you cheated out by getting questions before hand). You can look at the test process in terms of game theory where one player deals with several players who are not all equally qualified and have incentive to get the prize. So the adversarial mechanics will eventually ensue and folks will try to "game" the system. If you invent whiteboarding as defence, folks will try to invent leetcode as counter measure. If you invent homework as defence, you can bet sites pop all over that allows you to search problem and frameworks and download the common solutions with a click.
- wilsonnb3 8y ago
  > you can bet sites pop all over that allows you to search problem and frameworks and download the common solutions with a click. Sounds like a lucrative business, especially if you can introduce enough variety into the downloaded code to prevent detection by a system like the anti-plagiarizing systems colleges use.
  - sytelus 8y ago
    I would fully expect rent-a-coder style service from Asia popping up to take on your homework question by an experienced programmer for a modest fee.
  - Thiez 8y ago
    There are techniques to identify a person based on their writing. Perhaps software could be developed that takes a sample of a persons writing, and then modifies text to match their style. Of course one would have to be careful that the introduced variations are not just in identifiers and whitespace, or plagiarism could still trivially be detected by comparing the compiled binaries (after stripping debug symbols, and assuming a compiler supporting repeatable builds).
- swift532 8y ago
  I disagree with one click solutions for homework being viable. In my view, the best way to assign homework would be to take a small feature or an interesting bugfix a current developer already solved, and assign it to the candidate. Of course, this is tough if you want to keep your code secret and can't isolate the component/service/something source code from the rest of the system.
  - sytelus 8y ago
    The core issue in interviewing is exactly this: asking a good efficient question! It doesn't matter if you use whiteboarding or homework or take a long walk together (Steve Jobs style). Most companies cannot expose their internal code base and expect someone to fix bugs in an hour of time. Ultimately you have to simplify the problem, chip away the unnecessary stuff and still it be good enough to evaluate candidate effectively. So if you think about this more deeply, you might realize that whiteboarding or IDEs or just talking is merely a medium to deliver the question and consume the answer. A vast majority of effectiveness of your interview doesn't depend on the medium but actual content of the question.
wilsonnb3 8y ago
Interesting. I'm the opposite. I'd rather pseudocode something on a whiteboard than spend my personal time doing it. As long as the interviewer isn't a stickler for correct syntax when I'm writing stuff on the whiteboard.

murukesh_s 8y ago

>Whiteboarding to "see how I think" is not at all how I would think if I were work for them Someone nailed it finally

decebalus1 8y ago

I completely agree with that. However, at least in my experience, the take home assignment was used to replace one or all the phone screens. So it was always an elimination round until getting to the whiteboarding sessions. I would especially like to call out Uber on that as a couple of years ago they wanted me to write some local public transportation service endpoint integrated with Google maps in order to get to the onsite interview. Told them I don't have time for that with my full time job and they just shrugged and were like 'ok, no worries, we look forward to seeing you on X'. So I guess it was also a sucker elimination round.

sytelus 8y ago

The problem is effort asymmetry. For in-person interviews, company must spend as much time as candidate is spending in evaluation. If homework thing becomes standard, I'm afraid that will become first line of filtering because it doesn't cost much to company. So you will still get in-person interview and may be even bit of whiteboarding (to make sure your friend didn't took test for you or somehow you cheated out by getting questions before hand). You can look at the test process in terms of game theory where one player deals with several players who are not all equally qualified and have incentive to get the prize. So the adversarial mechanics will eventually ensue and folks will try to "game" the system. If you invent whiteboarding as defence, folks will try to invent leetcode as counter measure. If you invent homework as defence, you can bet sites pop all over that allows you to search problem and frameworks and download the common solutions with a click.

wilsonnb3 8y ago
> you can bet sites pop all over that allows you to search problem and frameworks and download the common solutions with a click. Sounds like a lucrative business, especially if you can introduce enough variety into the downloaded code to prevent detection by a system like the anti-plagiarizing systems colleges use.
- sytelus 8y ago
  I would fully expect rent-a-coder style service from Asia popping up to take on your homework question by an experienced programmer for a modest fee.
- Thiez 8y ago
  There are techniques to identify a person based on their writing. Perhaps software could be developed that takes a sample of a persons writing, and then modifies text to match their style. Of course one would have to be careful that the introduced variations are not just in identifiers and whitespace, or plagiarism could still trivially be detected by comparing the compiled binaries (after stripping debug symbols, and assuming a compiler supporting repeatable builds).
swift532 8y ago
I disagree with one click solutions for homework being viable. In my view, the best way to assign homework would be to take a small feature or an interesting bugfix a current developer already solved, and assign it to the candidate. Of course, this is tough if you want to keep your code secret and can't isolate the component/service/something source code from the rest of the system.
- sytelus 8y ago
  The core issue in interviewing is exactly this: asking a good efficient question! It doesn't matter if you use whiteboarding or homework or take a long walk together (Steve Jobs style). Most companies cannot expose their internal code base and expect someone to fix bugs in an hour of time. Ultimately you have to simplify the problem, chip away the unnecessary stuff and still it be good enough to evaluate candidate effectively. So if you think about this more deeply, you might realize that whiteboarding or IDEs or just talking is merely a medium to deliver the question and consume the answer. A vast majority of effectiveness of your interview doesn't depend on the medium but actual content of the question.

wilsonnb3 8y ago

Interesting. I'm the opposite. I'd rather pseudocode something on a whiteboard than spend my personal time doing it. As long as the interviewer isn't a stickler for correct syntax when I'm writing stuff on the whiteboard.