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> Nobody likes whiteboarding That's why companies should allow laptops. > Take-home assignments are unpaid work True, they could be optional. You may not get

> Nobody likes whiteboarding That's why companies should allow laptops. > Take-home assignments are unpaid work True, they could be optional. You may not get the job if you don't do it. Honestly, if you can't spend one or two hours on a take home assignment during a 7 day period, you certainly have different problems than applying at this company. > Pair programming during interviews makes people uncomfortable I agree, pair programming during an interview is mostly a no go. Not because of the issues you mentioned but because most interviewers are totally unqualified to do this properly (unfortunately, most interviewers are also unqualified in general to conduct interviews). It takes a lot of skill to conduct pair programming interviews and draw the correct conclusions. > People who currently have good jobs are unwilling to consider contract-to-hire In US, there is practically no difference between those three. You can be fired any day anyway. But yes, if you have a secure job that is good, the bar for switching is high, but so what? Why even switch? It's your choice then... Luxury problem! > Credentials, including graduate degrees, are no guarantee that someone is a good engineer I would go as far as saying your credentials and degrees are horrendously irrelevant in predicting your skills as an engineer. The only thing you might be able to conclude is that a GPA 4 M.I.T. graduate probably can pick up missing knowledge quickly, as opposed to a no degree dish washer who learned "how to code" in a 6 week bootcamp. On that note I have experienced first hand, Berkeley and Georgia Tech CS majors, who were absolutely incompetent on the job and just had no idea what the hell they were doing, with little improvement in sight...

jedberg 7y ago
> Honestly, if you can't spend one or two hours on a take home assignment during a 7 day period, you certainly have different problems than applying at this company. That's an extremely privileged thing to say. And what a terrible way to start out your working relationship. The very first thing you ask of me is to do unpaid work in my free time? IF you're willing to do that, how else will abuse me in the future? Also, why should they spend time on your homework before they know if you're a company they would even want to work for?
- gjm11 7y ago
  I mostly agree, but attending any interview is also doing unpaid work in your free time, and often takes a comparable amount of time to the sort of take-home assignments used for recruiting. I think the reason why take-home assignments tend to feel more unreasonable is the asymmetry. If I attend an interview, it's costing a pile of my time, but it's also costing a similar pile of time for multiple people at the company where I'm interviewing, which gives me some reason to think that my application's going to be considered seriously and therefore that the effort I'm putting in isn't going to be totally wasted. Whereas a company can hand out a take-home assignment with no effort at all, so the fact that I've been given one doesn't indicate that the prospective employer sees me as a serious prospect or that there aren't hundreds of other candidates in the same position as me, so it's no guarantee that my chances of getting hired aren't miserably low, so there's more risk that I'm wasting my time.
  - jedberg 7y ago
    I think you've hit the nail on the head here. A homework assignment does not indicate seriousness on the part of the company. Great insight!
  - fleetingmoments 7y ago
    As someone who uses take-home assignments as part of my hiring process, I disagree that it is no effort at all. We still have to review submissions, get the code running (we usually let the candidate do the problem with the tools of their choice). You won't believe the number of candidates we receive with great looking CVs who struggle with a warm-up coding question like this: https://www.hackerrank.com/challenges/python-quest-1/problem https://www.hackerrank.com/challenges/python-quest-1/problem If anything, completing the assignment and at having some working code already gets you above 90% of applicants.
- criddell 7y ago
  Would you feel better for it if you were paid $100 to do the assignment? That might be way less than you normally make, but it's something.
musicale 7y ago
> credentials and degrees are horrendously irrelevant in predicting your skills as an engineer I'd suggest that an MSEE or MSCS degree from a good school tends to be pretty good training for working in the industry. The projects you complete are usually challenging, relevant, and intentionally educational. For example, an MSEE might learn how design analog amplifiers and filters, program a DSP, lay out VLSI circuits for an ASIC, implement a RISC CPU in verilog, implement an internet router on an FPGA, and implement Wi-Fi on a software radio. I'd be happy to hire (or work with) someone who can do all that!
- tempsolution 7y ago
  Yeah except that for 99.9999% of software engineering jobs, that knowledge is irrelevant. Also, to be a good engineer, you need to have MUCH more than just some math and raw computer science knowledge. I would go as far as saying that all scientific tasks are mostly carried out by research scientists these days anyway. The skills you need at companies like Google or Amazon, as a regular engineer, have VERY little to do with what you learned at University, which is why we hire even PhDs as junior engineers, and they usually are. They know a lot of stuff that doesn't matter (like how to color a graph), sure, but they also don't know a lot of stuff that matters (how to build production quality software, without shooting yourself into the foot at every turn).
  - twblalock 7y ago
    I really wish university CS programs would have a course on how to use source control (probably Git), and CI (probably Jenkins). I'm sure some programs teach this stuff already. But I've hired people with graduate degrees in CS from well-known schools who didn't even use source control for their group projects in grad school -- they just emailed the source files to each other.
  - musicale 7y ago
    What a strange and puzzling response! 0. You seem to have misunderstood my electrical engineering example. 1. Why would an MSEE not qualify you to be hired as a junior electrical engineer? 2. Why would a PhD in the appropriate area not qualify you to be hired as a junior research scientist?
jecxjo 7y ago
>> People who currently have good jobs are unwilling to consider contract-to-hire > In US, there is practically no difference between those three. You can be fired any day anyway. But yes, if you have a secure job that is good, the bar for switching is high, but so what? Why even switch? It's your choice then... Luxury problem! It seemed weird to me that we are one of the only industries (well I guess engineering in general) who gets a contract that is contingent on each day until it is completed. At any given point you could be let go and yet if I contract someone to work on my home to legal work you setup a contract that states you owe them the money unless you are willing to go to court to contest their work. When I last did a contract-to-hire it was basically "you can be let go for any reason, from slow output to your boss having a headache." Unless you get a sweet deal its difficult to pull a job with a set start / end time with guaranteed payout regardless of employment. I busted my hump at that last job so instead of doing my 6 months for the hire option they offered me the job before then 2nd month was over.
- notatgoogle2 7y ago
  Not only that, but the GP misses the point that, while yes I can work for myself and do contract work, I then also have to find health insurance, pay taxes monthly, do a bunch of extra accounting that does nothing to move my business forward and is boring, etc. That's fine if you get more benefit that the resource sink of doing those things, but for most people that's only additional stress and no additional value. So saying they're equivalent is patently absurd.
kart23 7y ago
Yeah, maybe degree isnt a great indicator of a programmer's skill, what about their past experience and projects? I think that at would at least make someone more confident in their abilities.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

jedberg 7y ago

> Honestly, if you can't spend one or two hours on a take home assignment during a 7 day period, you certainly have different problems than applying at this company. That's an extremely privileged thing to say. And what a terrible way to start out your working relationship. The very first thing you ask of me is to do unpaid work in my free time? IF you're willing to do that, how else will abuse me in the future? Also, why should they spend time on your homework before they know if you're a company they would even want to work for?

gjm11 7y ago
I mostly agree, but attending any interview is also doing unpaid work in your free time, and often takes a comparable amount of time to the sort of take-home assignments used for recruiting. I think the reason why take-home assignments tend to feel more unreasonable is the asymmetry. If I attend an interview, it's costing a pile of my time, but it's also costing a similar pile of time for multiple people at the company where I'm interviewing, which gives me some reason to think that my application's going to be considered seriously and therefore that the effort I'm putting in isn't going to be totally wasted. Whereas a company can hand out a take-home assignment with no effort at all, so the fact that I've been given one doesn't indicate that the prospective employer sees me as a serious prospect or that there aren't hundreds of other candidates in the same position as me, so it's no guarantee that my chances of getting hired aren't miserably low, so there's more risk that I'm wasting my time.
- jedberg 7y ago
  I think you've hit the nail on the head here. A homework assignment does not indicate seriousness on the part of the company. Great insight!
- fleetingmoments 7y ago
  As someone who uses take-home assignments as part of my hiring process, I disagree that it is no effort at all. We still have to review submissions, get the code running (we usually let the candidate do the problem with the tools of their choice). You won't believe the number of candidates we receive with great looking CVs who struggle with a warm-up coding question like this: https://www.hackerrank.com/challenges/python-quest-1/problem https://www.hackerrank.com/challenges/python-quest-1/problem If anything, completing the assignment and at having some working code already gets you above 90% of applicants.
criddell 7y ago
Would you feel better for it if you were paid $100 to do the assignment? That might be way less than you normally make, but it's something.

musicale 7y ago

> credentials and degrees are horrendously irrelevant in predicting your skills as an engineer I'd suggest that an MSEE or MSCS degree from a good school tends to be pretty good training for working in the industry. The projects you complete are usually challenging, relevant, and intentionally educational. For example, an MSEE might learn how design analog amplifiers and filters, program a DSP, lay out VLSI circuits for an ASIC, implement a RISC CPU in verilog, implement an internet router on an FPGA, and implement Wi-Fi on a software radio. I'd be happy to hire (or work with) someone who can do all that!

tempsolution 7y ago
Yeah except that for 99.9999% of software engineering jobs, that knowledge is irrelevant. Also, to be a good engineer, you need to have MUCH more than just some math and raw computer science knowledge. I would go as far as saying that all scientific tasks are mostly carried out by research scientists these days anyway. The skills you need at companies like Google or Amazon, as a regular engineer, have VERY little to do with what you learned at University, which is why we hire even PhDs as junior engineers, and they usually are. They know a lot of stuff that doesn't matter (like how to color a graph), sure, but they also don't know a lot of stuff that matters (how to build production quality software, without shooting yourself into the foot at every turn).
- twblalock 7y ago
  I really wish university CS programs would have a course on how to use source control (probably Git), and CI (probably Jenkins). I'm sure some programs teach this stuff already. But I've hired people with graduate degrees in CS from well-known schools who didn't even use source control for their group projects in grad school -- they just emailed the source files to each other.
- musicale 7y ago
  What a strange and puzzling response! 0. You seem to have misunderstood my electrical engineering example. 1. Why would an MSEE not qualify you to be hired as a junior electrical engineer? 2. Why would a PhD in the appropriate area not qualify you to be hired as a junior research scientist?

jecxjo 7y ago

>> People who currently have good jobs are unwilling to consider contract-to-hire > In US, there is practically no difference between those three. You can be fired any day anyway. But yes, if you have a secure job that is good, the bar for switching is high, but so what? Why even switch? It's your choice then... Luxury problem! It seemed weird to me that we are one of the only industries (well I guess engineering in general) who gets a contract that is contingent on each day until it is completed. At any given point you could be let go and yet if I contract someone to work on my home to legal work you setup a contract that states you owe them the money unless you are willing to go to court to contest their work. When I last did a contract-to-hire it was basically "you can be let go for any reason, from slow output to your boss having a headache." Unless you get a sweet deal its difficult to pull a job with a set start / end time with guaranteed payout regardless of employment. I busted my hump at that last job so instead of doing my 6 months for the hire option they offered me the job before then 2nd month was over.

notatgoogle2 7y ago
Not only that, but the GP misses the point that, while yes I can work for myself and do contract work, I then also have to find health insurance, pay taxes monthly, do a bunch of extra accounting that does nothing to move my business forward and is boring, etc. That's fine if you get more benefit that the resource sink of doing those things, but for most people that's only additional stress and no additional value. So saying they're equivalent is patently absurd.

kart23 7y ago

Yeah, maybe degree isnt a great indicator of a programmer's skill, what about their past experience and projects? I think that at would at least make someone more confident in their abilities.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]