4 ms·

Take-homes are valid. Maybe 4-5 hours worth of take-home is a reasonable approach to seeing if someone is really a decent coder. Lots of companies will ask yo

Take-homes are valid. Maybe 4-5 hours worth of take-home is a reasonable approach to seeing if someone is really a decent coder. Lots of companies will ask you to spend 4-5 hours in an onsite interview. Substituting much of that onsite interview time with an take-home exercise has its pros and cons, but it's not insane, and it's not exploitative. 50 hours is not reasonable or valid.

fossuser 7y ago
For one my first interviews out of school (justin.tv) I had a take home which I liked, but it wasn't a substitution for the interview time - it was more of a pre-screen for the phone screen which then did the same solve a puzzle while I'm watching you thing. The take home went well and took an hour or two, but it was a well contained problem and fun to write. I didn't do well on the docs share screen which is largely a separate skill you have to prepare for and I find more stressful. Early on the 'I'm watching you solve a math puzzle' is brutal especially if you didn't go to MIT/Stanford where you're pretty well prepared for how to succeed in the technical interviews. My school (RPI) was more harmful than helpful - they had no idea how the process worked so you mostly learn through failure. This plus a dash of imposter syndrome makes succeeding in these out of school pretty tough. Once you've validated your skills by succeeding and working somewhere it's easier - I'd guess because you're more confident in your ability. I wonder how much engineer mobility is limited by the stress of these interviews. If you don't find them stressful you have a pretty easy way to massively increase your income in a couple years. There's a lot of value in just getting good at passing technical screens. I don't have a better solution to this, but it is frustrating. Lambda school's approach to preparing explicitly for it is probably a good one.

fossuser 7y ago

For one my first interviews out of school (justin.tv) I had a take home which I liked, but it wasn't a substitution for the interview time - it was more of a pre-screen for the phone screen which then did the same solve a puzzle while I'm watching you thing. The take home went well and took an hour or two, but it was a well contained problem and fun to write. I didn't do well on the docs share screen which is largely a separate skill you have to prepare for and I find more stressful. Early on the 'I'm watching you solve a math puzzle' is brutal especially if you didn't go to MIT/Stanford where you're pretty well prepared for how to succeed in the technical interviews. My school (RPI) was more harmful than helpful - they had no idea how the process worked so you mostly learn through failure. This plus a dash of imposter syndrome makes succeeding in these out of school pretty tough. Once you've validated your skills by succeeding and working somewhere it's easier - I'd guess because you're more confident in your ability. I wonder how much engineer mobility is limited by the stress of these interviews. If you don't find them stressful you have a pretty easy way to massively increase your income in a couple years. There's a lot of value in just getting good at passing technical screens. I don't have a better solution to this, but it is frustrating. Lambda school's approach to preparing explicitly for it is probably a good one.