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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 sta
by 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 agoI 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 agoThere 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 agoI 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 agoThe 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.