5 ms·

I'm interviewing with 6 companies simultaneously and like you they all think they're deserving of free labor. I'd wager your company must have the worst devs,

I'm interviewing with 6 companies simultaneously and like you they all think they're deserving of free labor. I'd wager your company must have the worst devs, those who have little self respect and zero other prospects. Do you not understand that you're requesting free labor from an applicant? Did you forget the purpose isn't to have the sickest challenge ever but to evaluate someone's code/ingenuity?

ambicapter 7y ago
Methinks you didn't read GP correctly. They took a 2-4 hr task and let the interviewee take 4 days, not including weekends.
- Zenbit_UX 7y ago
  2-4 hours is anywhere from $100 to $800 worth of free labor depending on how the dev values their time. The GP was bragging about how generous they were in providing multiple days and weekends to finish it. How did this become acceptable practice for hiring people? Do any other industries besides tech do this?
  - thomascgalvin 7y ago
    So teams should just not vet candidates? An in person interview is also going to be 2-4 hours, plus travel time. Should we stop doing those, too? How exactly do you suggest teams screen candidates?
    - Zenbit_UX 7y ago
      Designers are hired based on their portfolio, why are devs treated differently? I have a plethora of options on my github as I'm sure most here do. Why is it not acceptable to judge a candidate by their already written code?
      - distances 7y ago
        Lots of people would see this as unfair, as they don't have anything GitHub. Either for preferring to do something else with their precious free time, or perhaps slaving full days in their closed-source jobs. I think the only fair option is an in-person interview without homework assignments. Treats everyone the same and doesn't require inordinate time commitment.
        nostrebored 7y ago
        Studying for a programming interview is also transferrable, whereas maybe pieces of your weird homework assignment will be applicable in another requested project. If I want to interview at 6 places that just use onsite interviewing it's easy to figure out how to prepare.
        AgentOrange1234 7y ago
        This is a good point. Also many places don’t even allow open source contributions, even in your spare time.
  - richrichardsson 7y ago
    They are asking the interviewee to complete the same task as done by an existing staff member, and compare the results, how is that "free labour"? I'm not sure where I stand on this sort of thing to be honest, my only experience of anything similar was a pre-interview task to implement a simple 10 entry LRU cache, and after getting the job I was told the only reason it was there was to weed out time wasters with next to zero skill being sent by the recruitment company.
    - david-s 7y ago
      work is work, whether or not it gets used. arguably this is, though
  - yoz-y 7y ago
    Any industry where hiring candidates with bad fit is extremely expensive will have a long interviewing process. For the candidate there is not much difference between spending 2-4 hours at home at a time of their choosing and 2-4 hours in a first of the N rounds of on-site interviews. Except they will have to expense transport and work around their job schedule.
zdragnar 7y ago
Many people prefer this to an in-person whiteboard challenge. It's lower stress, and doesn't require taking additional time off from your current employer. A 2-4 hour challenge is less time than I've spent in interviews at some companies, and would gladly have done it prior to an in-person interview given the option. That way, the actual interview time could have been spent talking about things of value, rather than having them stare at me while I white-board out problems around graph data structures and recursion and whatever other trite trivia they can come up with.
- michaelt 7y ago
  To be useful for discriminating between competent candidates, a challenge has to either be hard to complete (pass based on completion) or hard to complete to a high standard of quality (pass based on completion+quality). In other words, it has to be at the limits of what's possible for people you expect to apply for the job. If you give me a 2 hour challenge with a timer so I can't possibly take more than 2 hours, I'm fine with that - but you won't accomplish the "lower stress" goal. But if you give me a 2 hour challenge without timing? I know for sure other people will have spent 8 hours making super-polished, gold-plated solutions. Can I afford to fall behind the competition? If not, I should spend 8 hours too.
  - zdragnar 7y ago
    > To be useful for discriminating between competent candidates, I helped redesign the code challenge at one of the companies I worked for. We (the people across the different technical disciplines we hired for) put a lot of effort into ensuring that: * the challenge could be completed in 4 hours * the challenge resembled the sort of work people would do on the job * the goal of the challenge was to inform a follow up interview, not punish people * candidates were explicitly told that they were not being timed, but that we expected the challenge should take them up to 4 hours to give an idea of the upper-bound level of effort expected The single biggest challenge was balancing "what do we need to know" versus "what would we like to know" versus the amount of time we were asking of our candidates. We didn't hard-fail anyone unless they were blatantly not a good fit from their submission, and I habitually wrote multiple pages of feedback for them so they at least got something for their time if they didn't get a follow up interview. Again, the purpose of the challenge was not a screen, so much as it was to help guide the in-person interview and so we had something concrete that we could discuss. Follow up edit: Designing code challenges is hard. You have to avoid something so objective it can be copy-pasted from stack overflow, but objective enough that it can be graded free from personal bias (as much as possible anyway). On top of that, you can't test for MVC+CQRS+FP+SOLID+every-other-possible-thing under the sun, because you have to be respectful of candidate's times. The previous code challenge (the one I replaced) would frequently take people 8-20 hours to complete, and it was actually pretty simple. As you rightly pointed out though, candidates often read far more into the requirements than were actually there, and would often over-achieve in an effort to stand out. Not only would those submissions waste their time, it wasted ours as well as they took longer to develop feedback from.
conanbatt 7y ago
What surprises me the most is people making 6 figure salaries complaining about making 1k investments into themselves. Absolutely worth it if it gets you the right job. Hell, most people pay multiples of that through recruiters and referrals.
- michaelt 7y ago
  If you're on $130k and take two days of leave for interviews, you're already making a $1k investment.
- Zenbit_UX 7y ago
  How many jobs do you apply to when you're searching? More than a few I'm sure. Maybe 10% of them get back to you with an interview request and that leads to a code challenge. It's highly plausible for a senior Dev to be simultaneously interviewing with multiple companies and have 5-10 pending code challenges. That shit adds up...
  - conanbatt 7y ago
    It also costs the company thousands of dollars in opportunity cost to interview 10 peolpe full days to hire 1. But the company sees the value in doing it, and many people dont see the value in doing it for themselves.
bluntfang 7y ago
>the purpose isn't to have the sickest challenge ever but to evaluate someone's code/ingenuity? This rings so true for me re: the last shop I was at. People got off giving "hard" problems and watching dev suffer and then giving high praise for the ones that could take the heat. That place was really toxic.

ambicapter 7y ago

Methinks you didn't read GP correctly. They took a 2-4 hr task and let the interviewee take 4 days, not including weekends.

Zenbit_UX 7y ago
2-4 hours is anywhere from $100 to $800 worth of free labor depending on how the dev values their time. The GP was bragging about how generous they were in providing multiple days and weekends to finish it. How did this become acceptable practice for hiring people? Do any other industries besides tech do this?
- thomascgalvin 7y ago
  So teams should just not vet candidates? An in person interview is also going to be 2-4 hours, plus travel time. Should we stop doing those, too? How exactly do you suggest teams screen candidates?
  - Zenbit_UX 7y ago
    Designers are hired based on their portfolio, why are devs treated differently? I have a plethora of options on my github as I'm sure most here do. Why is it not acceptable to judge a candidate by their already written code?
    - distances 7y ago
      Lots of people would see this as unfair, as they don't have anything GitHub. Either for preferring to do something else with their precious free time, or perhaps slaving full days in their closed-source jobs. I think the only fair option is an in-person interview without homework assignments. Treats everyone the same and doesn't require inordinate time commitment.
      - nostrebored 7y ago
        Studying for a programming interview is also transferrable, whereas maybe pieces of your weird homework assignment will be applicable in another requested project. If I want to interview at 6 places that just use onsite interviewing it's easy to figure out how to prepare.
      - AgentOrange1234 7y ago
        This is a good point. Also many places don’t even allow open source contributions, even in your spare time.
- richrichardsson 7y ago
  They are asking the interviewee to complete the same task as done by an existing staff member, and compare the results, how is that "free labour"? I'm not sure where I stand on this sort of thing to be honest, my only experience of anything similar was a pre-interview task to implement a simple 10 entry LRU cache, and after getting the job I was told the only reason it was there was to weed out time wasters with next to zero skill being sent by the recruitment company.
  - david-s 7y ago
    work is work, whether or not it gets used. arguably this is, though
- yoz-y 7y ago
  Any industry where hiring candidates with bad fit is extremely expensive will have a long interviewing process. For the candidate there is not much difference between spending 2-4 hours at home at a time of their choosing and 2-4 hours in a first of the N rounds of on-site interviews. Except they will have to expense transport and work around their job schedule.

zdragnar 7y ago

Many people prefer this to an in-person whiteboard challenge. It's lower stress, and doesn't require taking additional time off from your current employer. A 2-4 hour challenge is less time than I've spent in interviews at some companies, and would gladly have done it prior to an in-person interview given the option. That way, the actual interview time could have been spent talking about things of value, rather than having them stare at me while I white-board out problems around graph data structures and recursion and whatever other trite trivia they can come up with.

michaelt 7y ago
To be useful for discriminating between competent candidates, a challenge has to either be hard to complete (pass based on completion) or hard to complete to a high standard of quality (pass based on completion+quality). In other words, it has to be at the limits of what's possible for people you expect to apply for the job. If you give me a 2 hour challenge with a timer so I can't possibly take more than 2 hours, I'm fine with that - but you won't accomplish the "lower stress" goal. But if you give me a 2 hour challenge without timing? I know for sure other people will have spent 8 hours making super-polished, gold-plated solutions. Can I afford to fall behind the competition? If not, I should spend 8 hours too.
- zdragnar 7y ago
  > To be useful for discriminating between competent candidates, I helped redesign the code challenge at one of the companies I worked for. We (the people across the different technical disciplines we hired for) put a lot of effort into ensuring that: * the challenge could be completed in 4 hours * the challenge resembled the sort of work people would do on the job * the goal of the challenge was to inform a follow up interview, not punish people * candidates were explicitly told that they were not being timed, but that we expected the challenge should take them up to 4 hours to give an idea of the upper-bound level of effort expected The single biggest challenge was balancing "what do we need to know" versus "what would we like to know" versus the amount of time we were asking of our candidates. We didn't hard-fail anyone unless they were blatantly not a good fit from their submission, and I habitually wrote multiple pages of feedback for them so they at least got something for their time if they didn't get a follow up interview. Again, the purpose of the challenge was not a screen, so much as it was to help guide the in-person interview and so we had something concrete that we could discuss. Follow up edit: Designing code challenges is hard. You have to avoid something so objective it can be copy-pasted from stack overflow, but objective enough that it can be graded free from personal bias (as much as possible anyway). On top of that, you can't test for MVC+CQRS+FP+SOLID+every-other-possible-thing under the sun, because you have to be respectful of candidate's times. The previous code challenge (the one I replaced) would frequently take people 8-20 hours to complete, and it was actually pretty simple. As you rightly pointed out though, candidates often read far more into the requirements than were actually there, and would often over-achieve in an effort to stand out. Not only would those submissions waste their time, it wasted ours as well as they took longer to develop feedback from.

conanbatt 7y ago

What surprises me the most is people making 6 figure salaries complaining about making 1k investments into themselves. Absolutely worth it if it gets you the right job. Hell, most people pay multiples of that through recruiters and referrals.

michaelt 7y ago
If you're on $130k and take two days of leave for interviews, you're already making a $1k investment.
Zenbit_UX 7y ago
How many jobs do you apply to when you're searching? More than a few I'm sure. Maybe 10% of them get back to you with an interview request and that leads to a code challenge. It's highly plausible for a senior Dev to be simultaneously interviewing with multiple companies and have 5-10 pending code challenges. That shit adds up...
- conanbatt 7y ago
  It also costs the company thousands of dollars in opportunity cost to interview 10 peolpe full days to hire 1. But the company sees the value in doing it, and many people dont see the value in doing it for themselves.

bluntfang 7y ago

>the purpose isn't to have the sickest challenge ever but to evaluate someone's code/ingenuity? This rings so true for me re: the last shop I was at. People got off giving "hard" problems and watching dev suffer and then giving high praise for the ones that could take the heat. That place was really toxic.