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The take-home-task and white-boarding culture around interviews is horrendous, and unfortunately pervasive. I've worked at startups for the last 10 years of my

The take-home-task and white-boarding culture around interviews is horrendous, and unfortunately pervasive. I've worked at startups for the last 10 years of my career and I can emphatically say that there are a lot of them out there don't participate in either practice. (General statements with lots of holes based on personal experience and general subjectivity ahead) White-boarding is for recruiters, hiring managers, and the devs who volunteer to step into interviews, so that they don't have to properly vet a candidate. It's lazy, and very often unrealistic. Take-home assignments display a general lack of respect for the candidate's time, are often nothing like the work actually being done at the company. And are a lazy, passive means to gatekeep the hiring process. Interviews that cover/ask about basic algorithms without acknowledging modern development practices and critical thinking (e.g. where and how to find the answer) aren't indicative of creativity or flexibility of the the teams you'll eventually land in, nor the company on the whole. --- The best advice I give newer, less experienced developers is: Build a public body of work in one way, shape, or form. Build relationships with people who can be good references. And lean on both as points of confidence when looking for work or being recruited. Look for companies with which the first person you speak with has a technical background, and actually understands what the role is for.

collyw 8y ago
> Build a public body of work in one way, shape, or form. This can be pretty difficult. Most places you work for will not have your work as open source. And if its backend work then there is not a lot to show the public in terms of end results. The sort of thing I am good at are building relatively large scale projects, it's not the sort of thing that I can do in my spare time without spending months. On top of that, I have offered people examples of code that I have in bitbucket and they still insist that you do their pointless c"oding challenge". Evey company thinks that they are special.

collyw 8y ago

> Build a public body of work in one way, shape, or form. This can be pretty difficult. Most places you work for will not have your work as open source. And if its backend work then there is not a lot to show the public in terms of end results. The sort of thing I am good at are building relatively large scale projects, it's not the sort of thing that I can do in my spare time without spending months. On top of that, I have offered people examples of code that I have in bitbucket and they still insist that you do their pointless c"oding challenge". Evey company thinks that they are special.