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I turned my interview task for Google into a startup

• marapuru 7y ago
  Interesting read. Its good to realize that a interview process and the work involved can turn into your own business. Shows again that good efforts pay off anyhow.
  • jmkd 7y ago
    Equally revealing on how submitted interview tasks can have exploitable business value.
• amelius 7y ago
  > You have ‘4–6 hours’ to design a slick product, with a memorable brand and cohesive working method. No one acknowledges the fact that in reality, you’re about to dedicate up to 5 working days on this task, with the potential for them to ghost you straight afterwards. To make this more fair, why not let the designer work at the company's office, so the interviewer can actually see how much time it took, and the interviewee doesn't waste more time than necessary?
  • Insanity 7y ago
    That's what's I thought too. At one of the companies I interviewed at, we had a programming task that could take max 4 hours. The interview was at the company itself. Less convenient for people who have a different job at the same time though.
    • aloisdg 7y ago
      I won't spend half a day in your building without being paid. At home, I can split the task. Beside, 4 hours task is a bad joke. I interview at a lot of different companies. I have no time for this.
      • dawnerd 7y ago
        My policy, before finding a place I like and plan to stick around at, is no programming tasks. There's plenty of companies desperate to hire than you can be picky if you know your stuff. I also will walk out if they start up with those 'clever' programming questions that have nothing to do with the job.
        • skrebbel 7y ago
          Can you illustrate that in practice? You took out the time to go to some office. You just spent an hour talking about your hobbies and attitudes and the company's working culture etc. Then, a programmer asks you to balance a red/black tree. You do.. what? You angrily throw the marker on the ground, cry insult, and run out the building? No, right? So then what? I see this repeated a lot on HN and I'm not sure I'd have the guts to walk out of an interview. To be honest, I doubt many people do.
          • bitcoinmoney 7y ago
            Also agree with you. Although I want to try it sometime, maybe when I have an offer on hand and just interviewing for shits and giggles
          • aloisdg 7y ago
            > You took out the time to go to some office. How about a phone call or a quick email to ask what is their hiring process, what is the work and how it is usually fulfill? In the current market you are not a seller, you are the buyer. Why should I consider working for you?
            • ivan_gammel 7y ago
              In the current market there’s abundance of junior or mid-level developers from body shops applying to senior level positions. If you cannot stand from this crowd and shine by balancing the tree right, why someone would care hiring you? I can tell you plenty of stories about people who had impressive background and great soft skills, but in the end barely can do their job.
    • yholio 7y ago
      They are not selecting for individuals with an ability to do the job, punch out at the right time, and then live their lives. Corporations love obsessive-compulsive workers who feel thankful to have the job, are willing to sacrifice personal time towards their business goals and would never dream to unionize or otherwise engage in collective bargaining. They want solitary and competitive workaholics, that's the whole point of 'homeworks'.
      • cf141q5325 7y ago
        You are selecting for people who make it impossible to realistically plan deadlines.
        • yholio 7y ago
          A.k.a individuals who accept whatever deadline is imposed onto them and work round the clock to meet it instead of telling management they failed to properly assign time and resources to the project.
  • itronitron 7y ago
    >> advised that we should spend no more that 3–5 hours on the task I have to wonder if they didn't get the position because they spent more than the advised time for the task.
    • bryanrasmussen 7y ago
      As a general rule when I'm given a programming task that takes 4 hours to do then - IF everything I will need for the task is already installed on my computer and all dependencies bugs and so forth have already been taken care of in these things - it will take 4 hours. Maybe the same situation applies in Design somehow? I mean yeah it takes 4 hours to make the product if you happen to have all the graphical elements you will be using already downloaded and organized. on edit: although I have noticed a disappointment in some places that I have not done a lot of time cleaning up the code after writing it and making everything beautiful and writing a good readme to tell them everything to do and so on and so forth and normally I don't do those things because I spent more than 4 hours because there was stuff that needed fixing and anyway if they wanted all that 4 hours would not be enough.
      • Zenbit_UX 7y ago
        Unfortunately not. Coding is like math homework. When your doing the math homework you know when your done, it's very obvious and anyone can check your work and clearly see it's either right or wrong. Design is like a book report for English class, it's bottomless and can always be improved given more time, albeit with diminishing returns. Design challenges are evil and bullshit, you can poor hundreds of hours into a design challenge and still iterate further.
        • bryanrasmussen 7y ago
          well that is sort of the point of my example - I am done with my math homework if the math works = I am done with my programming assignment if the program does what was asked. But people complain that I am not done with the programming assignment if I have not made it DRY enough, or put in tests, or done a readme outlining more advanced than run npm install then do npm run start. Programming assignments may not be infinitely improvable but they can often be improved, I just don't consider it worth the effort to improve the work before submitting
  • meheleventyone 7y ago
    These tests are being used as a pre-filter to avoid the expense of bringing someone into the office.
  • thomasahle 7y ago
    > To make this more fair, why not let the designer work at the company's office, so the interviewer can actually see how much time it took, and the interviewee doesn't waste more time than necessary? I had an interview once where we were on the phone, I got the task, and they told me they'd call me back 2 hours later. Might be easier if the office is far away.
  • mrisoli 7y ago
    I've done that a few time actually. My last company they flew me from another continent to do a 3-days assessment, I worked with the team on a legitimate feature(that would be trashed after as they couldn't use the code because I was unpaid). I liked it, I met the team, I interacted with them, I did the task and got a job offer in the end. All engineers at the company highly valued the 3 days assessment because we got to select great people to work with, but we were getting too many candidates giving up or false negatives, they eventually cut it down to 1-day despite our protests.
    • kdazzle 7y ago
      3 days of work unpaid!!?
      • jacurtis 7y ago
        Plus international travel. Add 1 day on both sides of that for travel. That is 5 days of unpaid interviewing.
    • gregd 7y ago
      I'm not sure what country you're from or what country you flew to for this ridiculous 'interview' process, but it's one of the many things I loathe about this field...right up there with "rock star" and "ninja" coder. Honestly it's stuff like this, that has me contemplating giving up this career path because there's just no more room for people in their 50s with 25 years of experience in information technology, who aren't willing to sleep at the office, drink your "insert trendy microbrew here" on tap, and suffer through a ludicrous ask like "we want you to work for three days for absolutely nothing to see if you're a good fit".
      • jacurtis 7y ago
        Agreed! Who has the time to spend on a 5-day long interview? If you are traveling internationally, then you have to add 1 day of travel on each side of your trip. Plus the 3-day "interview" or challenge or whatever. So that is 5 straight days of interviewing for a job. That is actually asinine. If you have a current job (most software developers do, especially the good ones) then that is an entire work week that i have to request off at my current job to go to unpaid work with no guarantee of getting a job afterwards. I can't believe someone has actually done this. It is crazy!
  • hbosch 7y ago
    FTA: You have ‘4–6 hours’ to design a slick product, with a memorable brand and cohesive working method. I don’t think Google necessarily requested a full end to end product. A nice logo/app icon for the “branding” portion and some UX concepts can definitely be fleshed out in a single work day, especially with zero tech/biz requirements IMO. Maybe you’d need to take an extra day just to brainstorm first... but actually pushing pixels, if this designer compressed his output a bit, could have happened in 6 hours.
  • smeyer 7y ago
    My employer has sometimes given out challenges that take a few hours. We just ask the candidate when they'd like to do the take-home and email it to them on that schedule. Then they have to submit their solution within the allotted time. It's a nice way to make sure the candidate knows it really only will take a couple hours, because neither side wants the candidate to spend 30 hours on a 3 hour take-home.
    • spraak 7y ago
      That still sounds quite stressful. Are any of your devs able to complete the task or similar in n hours/3 tim
      • smeyer 7y ago
        I don't doubt that it's quite stressful for some people. In general, I think any element of an interview process is going to be stressful for at least some people, just given the stakes involved. That said, at least this guarantees it's not stressful and a big time sink. Also, I do think that some people are able to complete it in a third the time, but I think the more useful evidence is that many candidates complete it and do a perfectly good job, some even with a healthy chunk of time to spare. If it were a totally unrealistic time goal I'd expect we'd quickly notice when no one finished.
  • gorkish 7y ago
    It's not supposed to be fair. Interview questions are designed to differentiate candidates as quickly and broadly as possible. This is one where the notional goal of completing the project is different than the true goal of seeing how the candidate performs when given an impossible scenario. The author of this article fucked up when he tried to pass off 5 days of work as an example of what he could accomplish in 5 hours. I am glad he was able to find inspiration from it, but for the success of his startup I hope he also is able to understand other, better ways he could have approached the interview task.
• amingilani 7y ago
  What a great launch story! I don't mean to reduce your experience to a marketing gimmick but I know that you intentionally crafted the story to be impactful and to coincide with your launch. Most importantly, though, you pulled it off really well! I can't help but admire the way this was done :) I hope my launch story is this good.
• krm01 7y ago
  Great job. One should always do the best work possible. If this means someone else rejects your efforts, it'll still be a tangible satisfactory memory that, like this specific example, could turn into something more.
• hising 7y ago
  Awesome to read about you turning this into your own startup. One thing I came to think about regarding the "4-5 hours" and throwing 5 working days on it, is that, maybe as an interviewer it is quite obvious that you put more than 4-5 hours into it and what they were "really" after were the trade-offs you would have made if you put 4-5 hours into it. Just a thought.
  • dannyw 7y ago
    Not Google, but similar company and can confirm. If you spend 5x the amount of time we suggest, it’s obvious and the expectations scale a lot, lot higher than if you just spent 5 hours.
    • gowld 7y ago
      So I should spend a few more hours going back to add flaws to make it look like I spent less time?
  • avip 7y ago
    This makes no sense for "product design". Just thinking about it, looking at existing similar products, before you even grab your napkin, takes 4 hours.
  • allenu 7y ago
    Yeah, it may translate into, "well, if I work with this person, are they going to spend way too much on details that I don't need and burn themselves out just trying to please me?" Part of working is being able to be assertive and say "ok, for only 4-5 hours, here's what I was able to do for you, so now let's figure out next steps".
    • gowld 7y ago
      Yeah, I hate hiring people who are interested in what we are doing and are excited to work on it. It's one thing to accept that some people are busy and shouldn't be punished, a bout are we supposed to only hire people who have zero excitement for the industry and job?
• bitL 7y ago
  Are you sure you didn't sign any NDA, preventing you from working on ideas you might get during interview? Google used to have pretty water-tight policy on outflow of ideas (but inflow was encouraged) during interviews.
  • candu 7y ago
    (Usual disclaimer: IANAL, just a person who's worked / consulted several places and signed several NDAs in his life.) Here's the thing: the NDA you sign when you go onsite covers the company's intellectual property. It might cover the interview questions they ask you, but if they're not paying you for the work you do as part of a take-home interview question, and if you're doing it on your own hardware - it's not theirs, it's yours, and they have absolutely no say in what you do with that work afterwards. Moreover: if you are subsequently hired by the company, they still don't own the work you did on your own time and hardware. (However: if you continue to work on it while employed by them, they might then own that follow-up work. Check your employment contract carefully, and if you're in a position to insist that employers do not own your off-hours work, insist away.) Now, if you're currently at another company, and you complete the interview task on their hardware, and especially if you make the mistake of doing that work during company work hours...well, your current employer might then own your interview work. This is a matter usually covered by your employment contract (and another excellent reason to read those carefully).
  • saagarjha 7y ago
    Does Google make you sign an NDA before you interview?!
    • amdavidson 7y ago
      We make our candidates sign an NDA before an on-site interview, but do so because of the risk that they see/hear some of our internal information during the interview process not to entrap their ideas.
    • joshvm 7y ago
      Implicitly, when you print your visitor badge you consent to the NDA. Though that may be a generic site NDA, not an interview one. I never had to provide an actual signature, aside from a verbal agreement with the recruiter to not share interview questions.
• davidbanham 7y ago
  > You have ‘4–6 hours’... No one acknowledges the fact that in reality, you’re about to dedicate up to 5 working days on this task I fixed that problem for my candidates then turned it into a startup: https://takehome.io https://takehome.io
  • greysteil 7y ago
    This is a really neat idea.
  • pbhjpbhj 7y ago
    Meta: I assume you're doing a website update at the moment. I prefer the blue! Though I might still use a white version on the homepage to remove emphasis from the header. Also, on you signup page it would IMO look nicer if you pinned the page footer (eg https://matthewjamestaylor.com/bottom-footer https://matthewjamestaylor.com/bottom-footer).
    • davidbanham 7y ago
      Thanks for taking a look! I actually have always had a different style on the landing page from the rest of the app. One was designed to be eye catching and the other functional. The landing page is probably due for a fresh coat of paint, though. I'll give some thought to pinning the footer.
      • pbhjpbhj 7y ago
        That's fine, and probably works, but the other pages look better finished and the menus jump around, etc., which gives a "in progress" feel to the site IMO.
  • ashelmire 7y ago
    Good. No more 4 hours challenges with unlimited scope.
• threwawasy1228 7y ago
  When people are turning their interview questions into successful companies, maybe it is time to start asking some easier interview questions. This is a visceral demonstration of how absolutely ridiculous interviews have gotten.
  • JacKTrocinskI 7y ago
    I call them low self esteem corporations, the interview process requires you to constantly flatter them and tell them how much you'd like to work for them. I have too much respect for my own time, what's important is on my resume and the rest they can find out in a short interview, homework assignments and cover letters are plain silly.
  • bufferoverflow 7y ago
    Google can afford to do that. They have so many applicants willing to jump through the hoops, they can pick the top 1-2%.
    • vonmoltke 7y ago
      The top 1%-2% who are willibg to actually complete the challenge. Probably not even then, as some of the top candidates who do complete the challenge may hold themselves to the explicit time limit.
    • onlydeadheroes 7y ago
      I hope they find the 1% top developers that can fix gmail interface.
      • y-c-o-m-b 7y ago
        Or increase the performance of Gmail (or Google Maps!!) back to what it was. Funny how the two apps ran perfectly smooth on devices 10 years ago, but they struggle with the horsepower on devices today.
    • dentemple 7y ago
      The top 1-2% can turn shitty interview exams into successful startup products. So clearly the process isn't working here.
• nwatson 7y ago
  A few things ... the word 'Crunchr' is real hard to make out when overlayed on the image of the person mid-pushup ... in that same-but-too-small font is your company name 'Tona' or 'Tonu'? ... the busy graphics on almost every screen looks great at first but would wear me out and get between me and my info, and looks too much like a cult-of-body-and-youth or like Men's Fitness, definitely not relatable ... the need to select a fancy background for every class listing would be tedious and would require extra info on whatever back end manages schedules, nobody will go through all that work and will be left with weird unrelated defaults ... that your original interview submission contains no rough work would make me worry you'd commit to a suboptimal path without opportunity to reset the course after a preliminary critique. I don't like all aspects of its design but after getting through its initial quirks the Android Simple-Workout-Log app is dead simple and bare-bones and works quite well without the busy graphics. EDIT: additional point.
• maaaats 7y ago
  I like the concept. I use Strava a lot for cycling, but it's not very good for non-cardio activities. Lots of people I follow also track their strength workouts on Strava, but I haven't done it myself as I find it hard to track progress when the system is not made for it. Before I have used Fitocracy, I'd say this may be the biggest competitor to this, as it is (at least 5 years ago when I used it) more tailored for strength, where one can log specific exercises and track them over time.
  • evanspa 7y ago
    You should check out my strength tracking app, Riker: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/riker/id1196920730?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/riker/id1196920730?mt=8 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rikerapp.riker https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rikerapp.r...
• siscia 7y ago
  I believe Google have brainwashed us all. Are we sure that it is worth all this effort? Are they so much better than any other company or startup? Is our own self so much more valuable if a random intervier liked our works an epsilon more than the other candidate? People inside FAANG are unhappy as well, they leave their company as well. I believe we should be less impacted by the ads that Google is running to sponsor itself as the best workplace ever.
  • dannyw 7y ago
    Their pay and RSUs are pretty good...
    • siscia 7y ago
      Nobody could say otherwise, but are THAT much better? Moreover, after some level of income the marginal improvement of more money approaches zero...
      • snarf21 7y ago
        I think it is a bigger issue of signaling. Just like going to Harvard or Stanford. Proving you are "good" enough to get a job at FAANG get you pay and RSU but then also sets you up for all future opportunities.
      • macca321 7y ago
        https://www.levels.fyi/ https://www.levels.fyi/
      • magicnubs 7y ago
        More money allows you to retire earlier (or have a big enough cushion to take time off as sabbatical or to start your own company or whatever), which is a huge benefit IMO.
  • allenu 7y ago
    I agree with you. I was immediately struck by the tone of the article that the author was "fortunate" enough to be interviewed by Google. Maybe it's because I've been working for nearly 20 years now and am becoming an "old man", but the feeling that Google is this promised land of opportunity rubs me the wrong way. Every company has pros and cons and I suppose Google may have a lot of pros (free food, good perks, and good pay) but at the end of the day, it's just a big company where you work on large projects and will likely have little say in the final product's look and feel.
• djohnston 7y ago
  i love this. so many companies try to get free work out of interviewees, nice to see tables turned
• jordansmithnz 7y ago
  This reminds me of a take home software engineering interview I was once given via email. Same deal, I was told about 5 hours. I’m an iOS developer, so I was expecting a pretty simple app. I opened the PDF to find not one, but three separate tasks. Completion of all three was expected, with an estimate of about two hours each. One of the tasks was to replicate Apple’s ‘Reminders’ app in its entirety, backend sync functionality included. Another, a task requesting Visual Studio (iOS devs have no need for any experience with this). I promptly replied declining to continue the interview process. If you’re ever in a similar situation, interviews can sometimes tell you more about the company than they can learn about you. Good chance I dodged a bullet, and could have been working for someone setting highly unrealistic client deadlines, with the expectation that I can build something in any technology proficiently.
  • wycy 7y ago
    Apple's Reminders app is so glitchy that your interview task probably would've been vastly superior to the actual consumer product.
    • leadingthenet 7y ago
      It's barebones, but glitchy?! I've been using it for years, and it's been rock stable for me.
      • wycy 7y ago
        I've found it incredibly glitchy. I have some reminders that somehow duplicate and show up multiple times (all at the same time), and others that will show up and instantly dismiss themselves. I can even be looking at my phone and see them pop up and instantly disappear. For a long time I thought it was perhaps due to poor sync with the Mac, since sometimes I manage reminders from there, but the same thing happens with the wife's phone and she doesn't sync Reminders. She has a single daily reminder at 10pm. Sometimes it shows up 4 times. Sometimes 4 times and 1 disappears for a net of 3 reminders. Sometimes just 1 shows up. Sometimes none of them show up. It's bizarre.
• swish_bob 7y ago
  I once completed the task sent to me by a prospective employer, and then thanked them and said I wouldn't be submitting it, as it told me enough about the way they worked to know I wouldn't enjoy it. Never forget that the interview process is two way ...
  • comboy 7y ago
    Those few big companies probably have more than enough candidates. If you have too many candidates you need to adjust interview difficulty to still hire only as much as you need. I don't think these companies care that the task is too difficult for 99% of people, or that there are smart people who are not motivated enough to complete it as long as they can get as many smart and motivated people as they want. That said, finding a job in IT if you are good at what you're doing is a dreamland currently, so declining if you think you won't enjoy working for a given company seems only natural. Given dynamics above I think you're likely better off not working for one of those top few companies if you don't care about prestige and long term job stability.
    • kqr 7y ago
      Then again, what the heck kind of use do they have for developers that can't push back on unrealistic demands? None, unless they're in the business of missing deadlines.
    • hobs 7y ago
      Simply put, no. If you have "too many people" you dont make the quality of your hiring "better" by making the process worse. Being more selective about who you hire is not related to making a stupid test.
      • mceachen 7y ago
        You're assuming that most recruiting pipelines are reasonable.
    • gwbas1c 7y ago
      Never assume that a company with a bad interview process has more candidates than they can handle. A company like that is probably wondering why they can't find the people they're looking for.
• ahoka 7y ago
  Actual Google app: https://www.wareable.com/media/images/2017/03/google-fit-app-1490141873-TZ46-column-width-inline.jpg https://www.wareable.com/media/images/2017/03/google-fit-app... WTF Google?
  • saagarjha 7y ago
    Are you complaining about the design of this app?
    • infradig 7y ago
      I hope so. Google Fit is atrocious.
      • ahoka 7y ago
        Yes, the app described in the article looks much better.
  • H1Supreme 7y ago
    OP's design is much nicer than this. Maybe the "3-5 hours" requirement was hinting that it needed to be as "material design generic" as possible. Which, this design clearly does.
    • allenu 7y ago
      I disagree. The OP's app is hard to read and has way too many visual elements that are distracting. Initially it has a "wow" factor but after repeated use, those aesthetics are going to be ignored and all your left with is hard to read text and distracting images. Google's app tends towards the bland, but I don't think OP's designs are a huge improvement. Also OP's app is targeting the gym nut. Google's is targeting the average person who is looking to just do any type of physical activity.
• sethammons 7y ago
  The rule of thumb I subscribed to: have the interviewer(s) do the interview. Give the candidate 3x time to do it that the in-house people took. Or, framed in reverse, if you want the assignment to take and n minutes or hours, give yourself n/3 to complete it, and however far you get is the bar for the assignment. Interviewees are stressed, maybe outside their domain, and other things. Make something that they can show you their value. The harder and correct thing to do is to find how they can help your org. It is easy to find what they don't know or to play stump the idiot.
  • dnaismith 7y ago
    We did this at my company. A developer at the level that that developer was applying for would do a task that took them 2-4 hours. We then gave the interviewee four days to complete the task with a recommended time of 2 days. We also always made sure to include the weekend in the time they had to complete the task as we know during the week time is precious.
    • ubercow13 7y ago
      A two day take-home coding test is absurd regardless of whether it's the weekend
      • andy_ppp 7y ago
        I read the grandparent as: The task should take 2-4h and be done within 2-4 days is how I read it. I’m still not sure why people expect it’s easy to fit this in and it’s the last thing you want to do after a hard day of work. I’ve just started taking a full day off for programming exercises I do when interviewing. It allows me to give well thought through and tested solutions even if I make some small mistakes or misunderstandings. Crazy I know but necessary usually these days.
        • wpietri 7y ago
          Except that they said it should take 2 days.
• p0nce 7y ago
  Easier to create a software company than work for one.
  • leesec 7y ago
    Nope.
    • p0nce 7y ago
      Try it and see for yourself.
• fendy3002 7y ago
  Seems like, if somehow your startu is a successful one, google can just buy your company. Win win
• maitredusoi 7y ago
  This how interview task should be made : generate something joyful and useful ; instead we usually have boring throw away to do task. By the way I had the same @ https://www.captaincontrat.com/ https://www.captaincontrat.com/ the task was to create a pokemon game, and from that task, I am building my current startup ;) (more on that later)
• josh2600 7y ago
  Someone on my team once asked an iOS engineer to add a button to a codebase during an onsite interview. That is actually a horrible test to complete in 45 minutes if the codebase is large (and particularly hard if it’s not super well maintained because even just familiarizing yourself with the codebase can take a great deal of time). It’s one of those things that sounds easy but really, really isn’t possible to do in the time allotted. I learned a lot about interviewing people that day.
  • ScottFree 7y ago
    I can't tell if this is brilliant or sadistic. On the one hand, it really tells you who's smart enough to realize the task can't be done in the allotted time. On the other hand, not being able to do something as simple as adding a button in 45 minutes has to screw with the candidate's mind. That sort of thing would shatter what little confidence I have. I'd probably tank the rest of the interview. > I learned a lot about interviewing people that day. Could you share what you learned?
    • josh2600 7y ago
      Yeah, adding a button to a codebase is an awful test. If someone made it to an onsite and you don’t know whether they can add a button in swift, something failed in your screening process. If you’re testing how someone navigates a codebase, you can just look at it with them, and let them drive the chat. If you’re testing an engineer for a serious job, do an algorithms test. If you’re testing an engineer for a specific thing, test that specific thing. Both of those should be handled in the screen, not the onsite. IMHO, the onsite is about seeing how people think. Whether you can jam a button into a repo doesn’t tell me whether you can think or not. I guess it tells me whether you get flustered, but it’s pretty unfair to design things that are impossible just to see if people break. That candidate turned out to be awesome but I remember the interviewer telling me after they interviewed them “well, they couldn’t add the button, but as they were doing it, I realized I wouldn’t be able to add the button either so my interview was inconclusive”, and I replied “well it sounds like you need to design a better interview question”. The worst part was, the interviewer spent the first 20 minutes of the interview talking with the candidate before giving them 25 minutes to add the button!! There’s a question we gave candidates really early on which we no longer do because it biases towards math nerds that I absolutely loved. It’s based on a movie called 13 Tzameti. I’m probably screwing it up because it isn’t my question but it’s basically like this: You’re in a dark room after being abducted by a gang. The lights come on and there’s 12 other people in the room in a circle and everyone has a revolver with 1 bullet in it (6 slots in the chamber). Your instructions are to spin the chamber on the revolver and, when the lights go out, shoot the person to your right in order. What are the odds you make it to the next round? It’s a crazy question and, what’s even crazier is that for some reason, as you increase the number of people in the circle, the odds of making it to the next round converge on 1/e. No one has figured that out in the interview. Also no one has figured out why it converges on 1/e so if you have any ideas, let me know. I like this question because it shows you how free thinking people are. I dislike this question because it biases towards smartasses and probability nerds.
• thunderbelly 7y ago
  Oh a start-up, you say?! WOW!Please post again when your startup is successful. Until then, good luck.
• baskint 7y ago
  Great story - well done!
• bumby 7y ago
  >No one acknowledges the fact that in reality, you’re about to dedicate up to 5 working days on this task, with the potential for them to ghost you straight afterwards. Is this as common as the author makes it sound? This seems like shady practice. I've heard of marketing firms doing this as a way to get 'free' ideas/work
• Zenbit_UX 7y ago
  I recently went through an interview with a company posting on HN and was shocked by their challenge. They provided their current UI (barebones dashboard) as well as instructions to launch the backend server locally and requested I upgrade their UI to include a side panel for filtering a data table. The task itself wasn't difficult, but the realization that these scum bags wanted me to upgrade their current product under the guise of a challenge. I instantly knew this wouldn't be a company I'd want to work for even if they did provide an offer.
  • hdfbdtbcdg 7y ago
    Are you sure it was the latest version of their product? Asking someone to do a task that you have recently done could be a really good code test.
    • Zenbit_UX 7y ago
      They had given me a live demo of their product on a call beforehand, so I know they didn't have this. They wanted me to design a feature they didn't have yet on their current product.
      • grogenaut 7y ago
        If they had paid you for your time would it have been ok?
        • entropicdrifter 7y ago
          Depends on if you're happy just being a hired gun instead of an employee. The real problem is that they've broken the social contract implicit in the interviewing process, which is that the work you're doing is only to prove yourself and that they won't benefit by it except to be able to gauge your skills. If instead they had been honest up-front that they wanted to hire you short term as a trial period type thing with the possibility of hiring you as a full employee down the line, that would be fair.
• albertgoeswoof 7y ago
  This is a really great marketing example! The creator has combined a top page HN post with a PH launch at the same time with really polished looking apps & landing pages. Essentially this will give them a huge traction boost on the app stores and a bunch of new users. Super impressive.
  • allenu 7y ago
    It's definitely good marketing, so kudos to the creator. I will say though that so many Medium articles I read now are essentially marketing pieces. They'll cover some topic very, very lightly and have a call to action at the end to view the author's product or company.
  • mmoez 7y ago
    Link poster here: I am not the creator of the app and don't know its author Andrew Burton. So there is no intentional coordination. Heck, Andrew may not have yet noticed that his article is a top page HN. I have just stumbled upon this article in a UX mailing list and thought it'd be interesting to share it on HN.
  • Loughla 7y ago
    Honestly, this type of advertising usually rubs me exactly the wrong direction. But after reading the discussion it prompted, I'm left questioning exactly why it does so. And like you said, slick marketing on the part of the creator at the very least needs to be acknowledged.
• VBprogrammer 7y ago
  Urgh. I recently had a similar situation. I started interviewing with a company who have a take-home assignment which I could have completed in the required time without taking any care over the quality of code I was submitting, but to do it properly I spent a bit of time thinking about it and building a reasonably extensive test-suite along the way. I was asked to come in for a face to face interview, for which I made clear I was having to take a day off of work, which was cancelled a few working hours before (so I wasn't able to cancel the holiday) without an apology. I was then interviewed again by phone and told that there was 'a bug' in my code and that I should try to find it and resubmit it without any other details. The spec was a puzzle with lots of weird edge cases and horrible inconsistencies. I decided at that point that I didn't want to work with them.
  • kemiller2002 7y ago
    I had one a little while ago where I spent a fair amount of time on the request, and I thought was pretty well done. It completed all their tasks, showed how to use their api, and it showed I know how to integrate several different technologies, from front things like React to building an API to interact with theirs and setting up and configuring cloud technologies. They came back, and said, "We don't want to continue, we expected more from him." I sat there baffled and so did the recruiter, as it clearly did everything and more than they asked for in the assignment. I am so glad they didn't want to go further as I am sure they are a nightmare to work for.
    • LameRubberDucky 7y ago
      There have been anecdotes on HN about companies using this type of process to get free work out of people. If your code solved the problem they needed solved, they may have taken your code/ideas and used it and left you by the wayside. I hope that's not the case but it's possible.
      • lawlessone 7y ago
        If it was an android app you'd honestly want to download their app and put it in the apk analyzer .. just check.
• ignoramous 7y ago
  A lot of people don't realise it but a lot of the tasks you do for you employer could very well have been a startup. There's a reason your employer has you working on those problems: They know what their clients want. Cisco is famous for funding startups by its fromer employees that satisfy their client wants. Google might be trying something similar with Area120? Being successful at startups is although an entirely different matter, and I guess that's why most people don't take up the opportunity. The paychecks are golden handcuffs, for some. I think, these pg essays are relevant: http://paulgraham.com/before.html http://paulgraham.com/before.html > The component of entrepreneurship that really matters is domain expertise. The way to become Larry Page was to become an expert on search. And the way to become an expert on search was to be driven by genuine curiosity, not some ulterior motive. ... > At its best, starting a startup is merely an ulterior motive for curiosity. ... http://paulgraham.com/start.html http://paulgraham.com/start.html > ...you don't need a brilliant idea to start a startup around. The way a startup makes money is to offer people better technology than they have now. But what people have now is often so bad that it doesn't take brilliance to do better. ... > The best odds are in niche markets. Since startups make money by offering people something better than they had before, the best opportunities are where things suck most. And it would be hard to find a place where things suck more than in corporate IT departments. You would not believe the amount of money companies spend on software, and the crap they get in return. This imbalance equals opportunity. > If you want ideas for startups, one of the most valuable things you could do is find a middle-sized non-technology company and spend a couple weeks just watching what they do with computers. Most good hackers have no more idea of the horrors perpetrated in these places than rich Americans do of what goes on in Brazilian slums. > Start by writing software for smaller companies, because it's easier to sell to them. It's worth so much to sell stuff to big companies that the people selling them the crap they currently use spend a lot of time and money to do it. And while you can outhack Oracle with one frontal lobe tied behind your back, you can't outsell an Oracle salesman. So if you want to win through better technology, aim at smaller customers.
  • naveen99 7y ago
    sorry for being offtopic: i see you list people you follow in your profile. Are you using a 3rd party service to follow them, or using the hn api yourself ?
• milesdyson_phd 7y ago
  The last take home thing I did, I put it up on GitHub with an MIT license (didn’t sign any NDAs/etc). I figured if there was a chance they would actually use it, might as well open source it for everyone.
• rdez6173 7y ago
  I am a software engineer and I was once asked during an interview at a large hedge fund to pick a side and debate why war is justified. When I pressed them about the relevance, they indicated that they often have heated debates on all manner of topics, so they wanted to see my thought process. I enjoy solving complex problems, but socio-ethical problems are way outside of my wheelhouse. I politely indicated that I didn't think the company was a good fit for me.
  • Loughla 7y ago
    How is that even remotely related to the job at hand? Why would you sabotage possible good candidates just so you can get your needless debate rocks off?
    • stronglikedan 7y ago
      Same reason why some would sabotage possible good candidates just because they never wondered how a toilet works. People are weird.
    • pxue 7y ago
      Because you're joining a team and should be a good fit beyond technical expertise. I would be very happy to have answered that question and would be a plus one in my books if I can have these types of heated talks with my coworkers.
      • Loughla 7y ago
        Non-baited statement (and I'm aware it's discussed a lot here), but my experience with people saying the candidate wouldn't be a good 'fit' was just a way to enforce bias either unconsciously or consciously. And led to problems with group-think and an inability to think in different ways. Now granted my hiring sample is less than 100, but that has been my experience so far.
        • PorterDuff 7y ago
          As a serious question, why do you think that dissimilar groups product faster or higher quality work? How far can you take that concept? Should they even speak the same language?
• wpietri 7y ago
  Is this common? > I was told it was extremely close and that I should reapply in 12 months, It seems really weird to me to put this burden on the applicant. If someone is above the hiring bar but just got edged out, shouldn't they go into the bucket of people to contact as soon as there's an opening? And for designers at a place the size of Google, wouldn't that be much sooner than 12 months?
  • allenu 7y ago
    I interviewed at Google and was told something similar. However, in their case they did reach out to me about 12 months later asking if I wanted to reapply. This was for a dev role though.
• sara7262 7y ago
  Even you can't believe there is a hen in world's biggest animals See the video how they looks and what they do https://cutt.ly/1rOU7Q https://cutt.ly/1rOU7Q Very funny dog using toilet Try to control your laugh http://bit.ly/2LVSNSG http://bit.ly/2LVSNSG Cute dog doing exercise like humans http://bit.ly/2Jq3rz http://bit.ly/2Jq3rz.
• djhaskin987 7y ago
  Is HN truly this bad of a bubble that everyone thinks interview tests are normal? The last time I had to do a test it was on site and I was just out of college. Most interviews just talk about the challenges of the team, my past work on similar problems, and how I solved them. I've been on the other side of the table too. It's usually easy to tell if the applicant is a quack or if they are skilled by how they talk about different technology: commiserating about familiar pain points, how they solved common problems. I almost feel at this point that it's unprofessional to hand out tests to people.
  • ep103 7y ago
    My company tends to hire more junior developers, I've been pushing for years to raise our requirements for certain teams, but its a cultural understanding problem from people at the top. Coding tests are the only strong indicator I've found for the interviewing process. I've had candidates talk their way through all of the other steps, only to find they can't code their way out of a paper bag. I really think the only accurate way to tell how well someone codes, is by looking at their code, and a coding test is a good way of not only doing that, but also comparing code from one developer to another in a controlled manner. I'll take it over hackerrank and other similar shitty websites any day.
  • thomascgalvin 7y ago
    > It's usually easy to tell if the applicant is a quack or if they are skilled by how they talk about different technology: commiserating about familiar pain points, how they solved common problems. I almost feel at this point that it's unprofessional to hand out tests to people. The problem with what you're describing is that it's using a proxy (discussion) to vet a particular skill (ability to program). It's very easy to vet someone's programming skill by having them program, and it doesn't take much longer than a wide ranging discussion, so why not skip the proxy and test what we're actually hiring for? Should a programming test be several hours (or several days) long? No. But an hour or two, I can't see how that's a terrible imposition.
    • ghaff 7y ago
      When I was an industry analyst, I did a lot of writing (and still do). We absolutely needed to see writing samples from job candidates. If they had articles and so forth that had been published, great. But there's no way we would have hired someone without evidence that they could write.
• nerdjon 7y ago
  Some companies do technical interview great, but there are a couple things that I have noticed that always make me question if I actually want to work somewhere: - Being sent to a website to do a take home coding exercise, with a checkbox basically saying "I won't use the internet, stack overflow, or similar". I get that you need to test my knowledge, but shouldn't you care more that I know how to search for my problem and understand a fix instead of flailing around? - (this one I have noticed in person) Being handed a thing to build, being told I have a limited amount of time. That all they want is a proof of concept, but the tooling they are asking me to use go completely against the idea that it is a "proof of concept" since they make certain assumptions about the end goal. EX: deploy something with terraform but we don't want you to build an AMI or anything like that so just manually go into each system once you create it
  • nmcfarl 7y ago
    Once I had a half day exercise that went even further - they provided the computer, removing the internet, but also removing all of the normal module documentation, and for good measure forbidding you from using any documentation from any source. There were a lot of compilererrors on the way to a solution for that one.
    • rightbyte 7y ago
      Unless you were using standard C with the standard lib that's madness. If it were C it would only be stupid. I remember the handwriting examans on University. But it was never any real full lenght programs.
  • jacurtis 7y ago
    I hate companies that act like it is a sin to use Google or Stack Overflow when coding. When I hear this BS, then I know it is clear that they have never coded themselves. I would love to meet a software engineer who truly can sit in a padded room and write code with no internet access to use for help or reference. Especially those of us that juggle multiple languages (full stack). Sometimes I know I need to run a method but I can't remember the actual method name or how it is formatted in this language. I know it exists, I have used many times before, but I might not remember the exact way it is worded. So I have to look it up. It adds <60 seconds for me to find. Or I might know a method exists but not sure which parameters it accepts. I might usually use the first 2 params and leave the rest, but this specific use case requires changing something i don't normally need. So guess what, I have to look it up! Sometimes I might get an error message that I don't recognize, so a quick look at StackOverflow reveals that a configuration item is off, or something was formatted incorrectly. I often can understand my problem with only just reading the first few lines of the selected answer on SO. I might be able to solve a bug in 60 seconds by using Stack Overflow, that might otherwise take hours to do without them. Especially as software developers keep getting asked to know more and more stuff, we have to rely on documentation and helpful sites in order to do our jobs. It is crazy to expect that you don't use those resources. Oh and ObjectiveC/Swift developers have it really bad. Some of the method names are entire structured sentences.
• cecilpl2 7y ago
  I recently was given a toy problem in an interview - read data in some format, process it, and write the output. Expectation was 4 hours of work, which is pretty close to what it took me to get all the edge cases, test suite, requisite documentation, and VS project/solution files. The feedback I got afterwards was "We're passing on you as your code doesn't compile/run on Linux", a requirement that wasn't specified.
  • 0xffff2 7y ago
    >The feedback I got afterwards was "We're passing on you as your code doesn't compile/run on Linux", a requirement that wasn't specified. I have to ask, was there something that implied that it should specifically run on Windows? If I got a software spec that didn't spell out exactly which platforms needed to be supported, one of the very first things I would do would be to ask for clarification.
    • max76 7y ago
      Applying for a dotnet position and assuming dotnet framework instead of dotnet core would have been very responsible two years ago.
      • 0xffff2 7y ago
        I guess I have a fundamentally different view of software requirements. Even before dotnet core even existed I would have explicitly confirmed that the company wasn't using Mono if they didn't spell it out for me.
        • monsieurbanana 7y ago
          I don't know about that, but you do have a fundamentally different view of software requirements for interview tasks than me.
          • VBprogrammer 7y ago
• jcadam 7y ago
  Maybe I should try to get an interview with Google so they can feed me startup ideas. "Wow, great interview task! Oh, I'm no longer interested in pursuing a job with you, but thanks."
• _JasonE 7y ago
  Correct me if I am wrong, but couldn't Google claim this is their IP since they provided the options?
• JansjoFromIkea 7y ago
  Is there a reason there's no naming and shaming going on here? One company asked me to do an implementation of the Bay Area MUNI network which fetched live updates of the locations of all buses every 10 seconds; there was more to it but I can't remember it now. This was to be done in React with D3 and no additional libraries were to be used to help with integrating D3 maps in React. The role was junior level, the job listing did not specify D3 as a requirement (which pretty much guarantees a lot of people would start into it without realising maps are one of the more complicated things to do in D3 as a newbie or how poorly D3 played with React), the role was in Europe. If someone can confirm I'm not breaking any rules I'll happily share their name. The best interview experiences I've had are with groups who just went through my (not very impressive) Github. A small coding challenge can be good as a thing to talk through during the final interview but anything longer than that and I'll tend to pitch sending them something I wanted to make in my own time regardless.
  • zymhan 7y ago
    > Is there a reason there's no naming and shaming going on here? No, there is no rule, unless you signed a contract stating you will never disclose any interview information, and even then, they'd have to find your post, find out who you are, and then take you to court over an extremely shaky premise. Just name the damn company people! You're giving companies far more credit than they deserve in these situations. I'd argue you owe it to other people who may follow in your steps to know when a company is exploitative, deceptive, or just plain corrosive. edit: now with less snark
    • JansjoFromIkea 7y ago
      > "Is there a rule I don't know about" > Goes on to not violate the rule that seems to exist Anyways, it was ThousandEyes
      • zymhan 7y ago
        I appreciate you having the courage to call them out :)
• btbuildem 7y ago
  People can tell whether you spent 5 hours or 5 days on a task. I wonder whether that's the reason for him not getting the job. Likely, the interviewers wanted to see what this person is capable of doing in a short timeframe, how they'll prioritize and deliver under such constraints. This guy failed to do what they asked for.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• TallGuyShort 7y ago
  My last company did interviews like this - I was always disgusted at the way most of the team would sit around and just find things to pick on in the person's code. Dumb stuff too. It became an excuse for a lot of the engineers to just make fun of someone who had successfully completed the program, but didn't take the time to JavaDoc everything and follow the same code style best practices we did. Things you can easily address with a bit of training and code review, and that maybe they already do when they're not trying to interview for a lot of jobs while still in school. Sad, really.
  • rickyc091 7y ago
    Not saying this approach was correct, but given a choice, what type of interview would you prefer? Hackerrank? In person, programming challenges, smaller take-home assignment, other?
    • TallGuyShort 7y ago
      As both an interviewer and interviewee I prefer in-person. Where you simply meet 1:1 with a few people - some talk to you about fit / experiences and some sit and work with you on a problem. Ideally, you would do the second in a work environment you're used to on a real computer instead of a whiteboard, and I haven't had a chance to do that before. I've seen a few poor performers slip through this before, but I do feel it gives a lot more room for people who just misinterpret what you're going for initially because there's more room for immediate feedback [1]. I've also had some disastrous experiences working with people who were amazing coders but were terrible and sitting down and talking through a problem with someone - I'd rather have a mediocre coder I can talk to. It gives the interviewee a finite time bound, and the company is spending equal manpower resources of their own (instead of giving you a 5-hour problem that you might secretly spend more on, when maybe they already are leaning towards a no but wanted to give you a final chance before ghosting). The downside here is it depends a lot on the consistency and skill of the interviewers, but I believe with good culture and training you can make most people good at this. [1] edit: Also, I think you can tell a lot about how qualified someone is by how they clarify the problem and how they communicate their thinking - not just the code they arrive at.
• john_borkowski 7y ago
  How did you get your first 5000 users? Was it word of mouth, or did you do any specific marketing? I am currency confounded by how people get users to sign up to products pre-launch.
• ravenstine 7y ago
  None of the places I've worked at had me do a coding challenge. Either they already knew who I was through networking or they asked me to show them a personal project and explain how it worked. Each job was a great opportunity. When I start looking for a new opportunity in a year or two, I may consider coding challenges to be a soft red flag in that I don't think they're worth wasting time over. I spent so many hours in the last 6 months doing various code challenges, some of which were borderline unreasonable, none of which landed me a position. I ended up getting hired by one of the top 3 places I wanted to work, and it was mainly because I had already networked with my interviewers. Maybe they looked at my GitHub, but I never asked. Regardless, coding challenges of any kind have consistently been a waste of time for me. Unless I really really want to work for a particular company, from now on I will immediately end my interview process if they ask me to do the following: - On-site coding challenges - Take home coding challenges - Whiteboarding - Brain teasers I don't have time to waste on that shit anymore. If having years of experience and a GitHub don't demonstrate to you that I can write code, then I really can't help you with whatever it is you're looking to achieve. Developers have to shotgun apply to many places in order to play the numbers game of getting hired, and life is too short to work an extra hour or more every night to code something no one will ever use that won't get me hired anyway. People are generally biased towards feelings rather than facts, and any of the above bullet points mostly serve as a Rorschach test for interviewers who have already decided whether they like me or not. Someone just breaking into the industry might want to go through the hazing process of hammering out coding challenges, but I refuse to have my personal time wasted. To anyone reading this, networking is a biggie. My dad used to tell me that and I never took him seriously because I hated the idea that schmoozing outperforms merit, but it's absolutely true. In reality, networking should be better because, at the end of the day, most people can tell whether you're competent and if they want to work with you based on how you naturally interact with them. Formal interviews barely work because everyone rehearses for them and they only prove that you were able to tackle one problem(which recruiters often alert candidates to anyway).
  • brianpgordon 7y ago
    Refusing take-homes is a reasonable stance but refusing to whiteboard strikes me as overly critical. It's a pretty standard thing to do in an interview... while whiteboarding may be a little silly, walking out of an interview after someone's already blocked time for you because you think whiteboarding is silly is even more silly than whiteboarding is. If I were the interviewer I'd be concerned that you can't be even a little bit flexible with things that you personally don't like.
• eruci 7y ago
  That's awesome! Working for yourself is also more rewarding in the long run. Keep your eyes open for more interview question ideas.
• JacKTrocinskI 7y ago
  Someone I once worked with asked me a question that I think is relevant here and I will never forget it (roughly translated to English): Do you work to live, or live to work? It's beautiful, simple, and for me it put into perspective what really matters. I value and enjoy my job but I refuse to dedicate my life to it.
  • jacurtis 7y ago
    That is a great interview question. I would happily answer "I work to live, and any company that doesn't want to hire me because of that answer is a company that I don't want to work for"
• judge2020 7y ago
  I guess grudges aren't held, but I do find it humorous that even after being rejected, the product's website "tona.fit" uses GSuite.
• tombert 7y ago
  I really despise these take-home projects. In NYC it's not uncommon for a developer to make ~$60 an hour, and these take-home projects can take anywhere between 2-6 hours, meaning that these companies are expecting you to spend up to $240 on a task where there's not even a guarantee of getting the job. Whenever I've done these, I usually end up doing them in JavaScript in a hyper-functional style (as is my nature since usually they won't allow me to do them in Scheme or Haskell), which ends up with the reviewer asking me to write it in a more "modular" way (which really means "please write Java in JavaScript"). I have a line in the sand now that I'm done doing take-home projects; I really don't need to donate my after-work time just to have someone who doesn't understand functional programming explain to me how it's not as modular as some Java OOP crap, especially when I could spend that time building a project that will, you know, actually make me money. EDIT: I realize that this came off as overly-hostile to Java. I'm not a fan of the language, but my point wasn't really the bash it, as much as complaining about people acting like my functional code isn't good because all they know how to write is OOP Java.
• jacurtis 7y ago
  Getting hired at Google is as much of a Lottery as anything else. You really can't look at interview questions and beat yourself up. There are Google employees who got hired doing much less, and other employees that had to work even harder to get hired. At that level, anyone who gets called to interview for Google is already qualified for the job. It really is a lottery at that point if you get the job.
• ronilan 7y ago
  “My mind instantly went to an app I love, Strava. I use it almost daily ...” So do I. And the other day, 200m into the run, I took a first glance at Strava and noticed it was way off (gps error). Ususally I would reset and start over. But, that one time I just turned it off. 30 minutes later I was back. I don’t know how far I ran (5 point something), I don’t know how fast (also 5 pint something) and obviously have no idea how my performance on sections compares to others. But it was a great run. A bliss. So, I’m not saying fitness activity tracking is no good or that google interviews are. I’m just saying, that, yah, every once in a while, in both, ignorance, is, well, you know...
• flashgordon 7y ago
  It is interesting to see this outrage from a lot of candidates. Back in "my" day (ie 10-15 years ago), it used to be that treatment of employed engineers was shoddy enough (without the benefit of decent compensation or environment) that it was relatively less risky to start a startup (aka ISV). But back then interviewing was specific, experience based and not standardized. Ofcourse as companies caught on and started selling the "we are Agile(tm) but also pay really well and pamper you", the incentives to start your own decreased. This resulted in an increased supply of candidates (at least for the "branded" companies). I wonder if the next catalyst to start startups is the shoddy treatment of candidates who are now pretty much moved through the cattle class of interviewing pipelines?
• thoreauway 7y ago
  I interviewed at Uber before they launched. Their "take home" was to create... Uber. Here's the exact challenge: UberCab Coder Challenge 1) Write a program that determines the wait time, trip time, rating, and fare for a black car trip in San Francisco, given that the customer's pickup location and destination is randomly placed anywhere in San Francisco proper, and given that there are X number of cars all placed randomly across the city. Use GoogleMaps API for trip duration time. Run simulation 100 times for 1, 5, 10, 20, and 50 cars. Output average wait times and trip times for each # of cars the simulation was run on. 2) Take #1 and do the same pickup and trip time calculation given that there are Y customer requests per hour (extra credit if this is done with a Poisson distribution ;)). Take into account each car's availability (given that they may have been selected to carry a customer and are in transit on pickup or on actual trip, and thus unavailable). Run simulation given the number of cars in #1, but for each simulation in #1, run once for Y=1x, 2x, 5x, the number of requests per hour (X being the number of cars in the city, as defined in #1) 3) Take #2 and then make a GoogleMaps mashup that then shows the various trips that were taken for each simulation. Provide mashup interface showing all trips but also provide ability to only show trips for each driver. 4) Write a "Hello World" app on the iPhone that for a certain driver logging in shows all of his trips taken in the last simulation, the average rating that he got, and the total fares he collected during those trips.
  • monocasa 7y ago
    Well, that certainly selects for engineers willing to do unreasonable amounts of work without questioning it.
    • monsieurbanana 7y ago
      If that's how you want to test potential engineers, I don't necessarily see a problem with the task itself. Just pay them! I'm sure Uber can find the budget for that.
      • hrktb 7y ago
        I'm sure they're fine with engineers who don't ask to be payed for random tasks encroaching their private life. Snark aside, it can iffy to pay someone for a task at your company when they are still under contract in their previous job. In that sense, while your point is sensible, it can be difficult to go that route from the candidate side.
• SonOfLilit 7y ago
  Don't found your startup based on the first idea you fall in love with. Don't found your startup based on the first idea you fall in love with. Don't found your startup based on the first idea you fall in love with. Make a list of attractive markets to play in, talk to a lot of insiders in those markets, choose three ideas out of at least 30 that you generated, put some serious work into validating their business models, then let yourself fall in love with one and spend 10 years sweating to make it a reality.
• xrd 7y ago
  Wouldn't it be interesting if everyone participating in these types of interview challenges refused to do them unless the work could be turned into a reference piece like this guy did? I doubt many companies would like that, but if a majority of people refused to participate without that clause, who knows? Clearly several people in this thread felt like they were being asked to do work which would be put into production and this would prevent that (though I personally am REALLY skeptical of those stories). It seems crazy that people are being asked to do work for even a few hours for "free" much less several days of work. If you are doing that, it seems totally fair to indicate that this work will be made public afterwards and made into a portfolio piece.
• stevenwoo 7y ago
  One California company that used cheap labor in third world countries to interact with customers asked me to create a scheduler so that available workers would make the system have 24 hour up time, log all employee actions, and determine employee status (fire or not) based on employee action history, they were doing it mostly manually at that point so the completed task probably would probably have fit into their production system (got access to old production data for making system), also 24 hours for a first pass, and 48 hours for a fully functioning system, for zero pay - also, they wanted someone open to writing software to replace the third world labor after this task was complete.
• kbknapp 7y ago
  > They presented three design challenge options to pick from, with a weeks notice and advised that we should spend no more that 3–5 hours on the task (wink, wink) I know this self-selects for people willing to do extra work for no extra compensation. However, let me play devil's advocate for a minute as a thought experiment. I would actually worry that this issue is also a self fulfilling prophesy. If I'm told to do X in Y hours, but it takes me 10 x Y hours perhaps the employer really does expect it to take only Y hours. Maybe the typical workload at that employer is for someone who really can do X in Y. As long as that is properly compensated, I see no problem with that. If the employer is asking for an extremely high caliber developer, and will also compensate as such then it's no issue. However, an average developer applies and thus has to lie about what they can achieve in that time-frame. Let's say they get the job and then when the workload is dumped on them it obviously takes longer than the 40 hour work week and they cry about "self selecting for people willing to work extra for no compensation." When in actuality, the employer expected, based on a false presentation, that it was within the average developer's abilities. Of course, I'm being somewhat satirical and without knowing the exact position and compensation being offered (as compared to average) no one can say if this is the case.
• tqwhite 7y ago
  One assumes that, now that you have told the world you got the idea there, that they will show up soon to claim your startup as their intellectual property.
• awwstn 7y ago
  Some companies use a process where the candidate doesn't see the challenge until pressing "start", and then they have x hours to complete it. This seems to be far superior for obvious reasons: 1) It normalizes the submissions, making the review process more accurate/fair 2) It removes any ambiguity or implication around the amount of time that should be spent 3) The amount of time a candidate has/is willing to devote to an unpaid homework assignment is likely not meaningfully correlated to their ultimate success in the role, but the process described by OP likely over-indexes for that.
• cyberfart 7y ago
  I love metrics that are essentially irrelevant but sound very cool like "our BETA users have burned two million calories collectively and lifted 500,000 tonnes".
• neilv 7y ago
  > with a weeks notice and advised that we should spend no more that 3–5 hours on the task (wink, wink) Was Google wink-winking, or is there a well-known practice of ignoring a real time limit, or is the writer imagining a wink-wink?
• mv4 7y ago
  Just a crazy thought, from seeing all these posts referencing their interview materials: 1. could a company go after you for violating the NDA 2. could a company, in theory, also make claim to your IP Would love to hear your opinions.
• jboggan 7y ago
  During a recent interview process I was given a take home assignment for data engineering. Well, I had to wait two weeks for the team to come up with a take home since they didn't have a data engineering assignment at the time. Eventually they sent it to me with a 2 hour time limit. I read the multi-page problem description which had bulleted requirements at three different places in the document, somewhat at odds with one another. There was a request to code a certain NLP technique from scratch and create a recommendation engine based on similar user history. I read through the sample data which had no notion of individual users or any table like that. The whole thing seemed like something copied and pasted together by committee, with a strong smell of "PhD CTO" trying to test for intelligence by quizzing on an esoteric corner of their own grad school experience. After about an hour of trying to figure out conceptually how I could begin to implement the things asked, let alone the 6+ hours I thought it would take in practice, I emailed the recruiter back and said "Thanks but no thanks!" My other recruiter friends later confirmed that they had burned through almost every firm in town with their ridiculous take home exams that no candidate could pass within the allotted timeframe. I think bailing was a good choice.
• sonnyblarney 7y ago
  Looks great!
• ppcdeveloper 7y ago
  This is nice. I've been working on something like this for a while but never finished(only time to build mocks and gather research). Good to see what could be.
• neilv 7y ago
  This isn't typical startup origin story IP OPSEC. Aren't you supposed to say the idea came to you in the shower, the day after you and a couple coworkers quit your jobs?
• ppcdeveloper 7y ago
  Product looks good. I have been working on an app like this but haven't had the time to complete (only time for wire frames, research and other peoples stuff). It's good to see what should be.
• paulcole 7y ago
  Biggest takeaway to me is that the candidate didn't do as asked because they thought they knew better. When someone asks you to do 3-5 hours of work, do that. If it's obvious you spent DAYS on this, what does that tell me as the interviewer/recruiter? I have no idea if this person can follow instructions and I have no idea what this person can do in 3-5 hours.
• qihqi 7y ago
  When I was in college I preferred take-home coding challenges and whiteboard coding questions than talking through experiences. ...Because I had no experience, and school projects didn't count. I had time that no one is paying for, I had skills (at least i believed), but no interviews because of experience. So coding challenge is the one thing that I can compete fairly with people with experiences, and I even had an edge because I value my time less. Of course, now I don't. But I was thankful that it is a thing so I can land my first job.
• beyondcompute 7y ago
  Why is Googleʼs design so bad then if they have such a tough interview process? Corporate structure/culture kills even best-of-the best talentʼs initiative? I think, what they need is non-conformism. But they donʼt select presumably for non-conformism during interview. They select for obedience. (Just thinking out loud) When Google (having so much resources) will release a product whose UI would make people say, “wow?” Not just the (superior) data-processing capabilities or pretty good hardware.
  • killerdhmo 7y ago
    Clearly this is subjective, but I'm regularly impressed with Photos and Maps. Thoughtful, subtle, and yet informative. With some delightful interactions.
  • omarchowdhury 7y ago
    Google products are optimized for action, not impressing Dribbble passerbys. Although, a "wow" UI doesn't have to be mutually exclusive with the goal of completing actions, but the who's to say others aren't saying "wow", even if you aren't?
• llamataboot 7y ago
  I love take-home assignments. Especially reasonably scoped ones. They allow me to show off my skills. However, my opinion is that it should be paid labor. Give me a day of work and pay me to do it. This values my time, it actually doesn't add all the much more to the hiring expense (all that engineer interview time, resume review time, etc is expensive!), and it makes sure you are screening out early and often and not wasting 20 people's time doing a bunch of take home work for one dev position.
  • isless 7y ago
    In an ideal world, the task can be something that the company needed done anyways, further motivating the financial insensitive. Your point about general cost of the hiring process is well taken, but I imagine that companies issuing take-homes are giving applicants the same task, and don’t see a point in paying for the same job to be done.
  • dmoy 7y ago
    I don't like takehome assignments because my current employer's moonlighting policies mean I can't do them. Ideally that wouldn't be a legal policy for my company to enforce, but that's the reality for me right now.
    • llamataboot 7y ago
      interesting, didn't think about that. From a practical perspective, I'm not sure that spending 20 hours+ working on something for free is any more/less likely to make you less productive at work than doing it for pay, but I see where the letter of the law comes in.
  • jhayward 7y ago
    > my opinion is that it should be paid labor. Every job I've ever had required me to get advance permission to do paid outside work, so such a rule would eliminate most people who are both ethical and employed.
• adamredwoods 7y ago
  In regards to a lot of talk about unfair pre-interview "projects", I highly recommend everyone ASK for an interview before working on the assignment, or if the assignment is short enough, work on-site, and request a code review in person.
• nojvek 7y ago
  Hahaha. TLDR: Google asked a designer take home question. Candidate did a phenomenal job. Google still rejected candidate. Candidate turned the take home assignment into a real startup. Just goes to say how much the industry sucks at evaluating candidates in general. This would have been a phenomenal candidate.
• zrail 7y ago
  I recently completed an interview junket. One of the companies I really wanted to get into gave me a take home. I completed it in the time they said it would take, submitted it, and then got bounced out. My inside source said that the submissions are run through an acceptance test suite (not exposed to the interviewee, of course) that can automatically bounce people out of the process with no or little human intervention. PROTIP: don’t do that.
  • boltzmannbrain 7y ago
    Why not do that? Coming from the other side of table, an immense amount of engineer-hours are devoted to the interviewing process, including code review on take-home assignments. Thus we try to make the process efficient. Typically there's a set of unit tests provided in the assignment to help the interviewee, and a hold-out set of unit tests that gives us a score for basic correctness. The score, albeit a low bar, is a useful threshold for eliminating candidates unlikely to succeed in the process. Those above the threshold have their code passed on to an engineer to review beyond basic correctness, and move on in the interview process.
  • yingw787 7y ago
    That doesn't sound fair unless the acceptance test suite is available to the candidate before final submission. In which case, depending on how the infrastructure is set up, could be expensive or slow. Seems to be a lose-lose situation.
• deleted 7y ago
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• brailsafe 7y ago
  Looks like the visual style of the most brand materials were heavily inspired by https://css-tricks.com/ https://css-tricks.com/
• mtnGoat 7y ago
  This sentences stuck with me and clearly illustrates how screwed, unhuman, and selfish hiring is in this business "No one acknowledges the fact that in reality, you’re about to dedicate up to 5 working days on this task, with the potential for them to ghost you straight afterwards." I was ghosted by AirBNB once, and I'm fine with not being good enough, but no feedback and never a response was pretty freaking rude. You ask me to do a task, i put part of myself into do it, and then no response, ever. I'm glad they never responded, i don't want to work for a soulless company such as that.
• phendrenad2 7y ago
  A lot of people are saying they declined to continue interviewing after receiving a take-home programming assignment that was too difficult to do in the expected timeframe. I wonder if the better tactic would be to simply tell the recruiter that it's too difficult, and see what the company says.