5 ms·

I mean, they can be time consuming - yes - but so can "grinding leetcode" for 3 months be too. Have you seen some of the study guides / roadmaps people make fo

I mean, they can be time consuming - yes - but so can "grinding leetcode" for 3 months be too. Have you seen some of the study guides / roadmaps people make for FAANG interviews? I've seen people claim they've coded hackerrank / leetcode / CTCI questions for multiple hours a day, for months.

tombert 7y ago
Well, I actually work for a FAANG company (not going to say which one), and I didn't have to spend hours a day for months to do so; granted, I'm a bit of a math/theory junky. EDIT: Also, at least with the Hackerrank for hours a day, it's not for any specific company. Getting good at these problems is useful for getting a job at virtually any big company. Contrast this to the take-home project, where (in order to make sure you don't just copypaste someone else's from the internet), they make these things kind of specific, making the transferability to other things substantially less likely.
NeverFade 7y ago
Even if you do have to "grind leetcode", at least that gives you the skills to get almost any tech job with very small marginal investment. Once you get very good at leetcode-style questions, just apply anywhere and get an onsite with a one-hour interactive technical screen, that will also tell you about the sort of people and culture that employer has. Conversely, homework assignments can easily take 5-10 hours. There's a lot of desperate unemployed people out there taking 10+ hours for these tasks, and setting the bar really high. A busy professional can be hard pressed to invest 5 hours they can ill-afford coding this task after a full day at work, then get rejected because some unemployed applicants dedicated 20+ hours for the same task. There are also services that solve these tasks for you, so now you - a busy professional - are competing against hordes of people who do these tasks all day every day for a living. So you hard-scramble 4-5 hours to finish a take home assignment to apply to just one place (!), and then you send it in and get a meaningless rejection note. Sometimes you don't get anything at all. These are some of the reasons I'm never completing a homework assignment again.
- tombert 7y ago
  I agree; in NYC, it's not uncommon for a software engineer to make $50+/hour; if you value your time at that rate, that means that some of these take home tests are effectively costing you $250-$500, when there's no guarantee that it will even result in a job. What also frustrates me the most is when they say "use whatever language you want", I use Scheme or Haskell, and I get feedback to make it more "modular" by making it more object-oriented. The reviewers of the take-home assignment will be too afraid to admit that they don't understand Haskell, too afraid to admit that they made a mistake making the language a wildcard, and automatically assume that it's less scalable because it's not Java.
  - mrfusion 7y ago
    I hope they’re making way more than $50/hour in NYC.
    - NeverFade 7y ago
      Yeah, $50/hr * 200 hrs/month = 10k/month = $120k/yr = $80k post tax. Not a great income at a place where a half decent 1br can easily cost you over $40k/yr.
      - tombert 7y ago
        If you're willing to go uptown to Washington Heights or Inwood, you can get a decent two-bedroom for around $2,000-$2,500 a month, at least I was able to without too much effort. I survived for about a year with a wife (who wasn't working at the time) at $90,000/year (I was working for a university). Definitely became about a million times easier to live when I left academia and started making six figures.
        NeverFade 7y ago
        I guess, but then your commute will become a nightmare. Either way, let's get real for a second: a software engineer is a highly trained professional working in an high-demand field. There's no reason for them to be earning $120k/yr, which is a pretty low salary in a very high CoL area like NYC.

tombert 7y ago

Well, I actually work for a FAANG company (not going to say which one), and I didn't have to spend hours a day for months to do so; granted, I'm a bit of a math/theory junky. EDIT: Also, at least with the Hackerrank for hours a day, it's not for any specific company. Getting good at these problems is useful for getting a job at virtually any big company. Contrast this to the take-home project, where (in order to make sure you don't just copypaste someone else's from the internet), they make these things kind of specific, making the transferability to other things substantially less likely.

NeverFade 7y ago

Even if you do have to "grind leetcode", at least that gives you the skills to get almost any tech job with very small marginal investment. Once you get very good at leetcode-style questions, just apply anywhere and get an onsite with a one-hour interactive technical screen, that will also tell you about the sort of people and culture that employer has. Conversely, homework assignments can easily take 5-10 hours. There's a lot of desperate unemployed people out there taking 10+ hours for these tasks, and setting the bar really high. A busy professional can be hard pressed to invest 5 hours they can ill-afford coding this task after a full day at work, then get rejected because some unemployed applicants dedicated 20+ hours for the same task. There are also services that solve these tasks for you, so now you - a busy professional - are competing against hordes of people who do these tasks all day every day for a living. So you hard-scramble 4-5 hours to finish a take home assignment to apply to just one place (!), and then you send it in and get a meaningless rejection note. Sometimes you don't get anything at all. These are some of the reasons I'm never completing a homework assignment again.

tombert 7y ago
I agree; in NYC, it's not uncommon for a software engineer to make $50+/hour; if you value your time at that rate, that means that some of these take home tests are effectively costing you $250-$500, when there's no guarantee that it will even result in a job. What also frustrates me the most is when they say "use whatever language you want", I use Scheme or Haskell, and I get feedback to make it more "modular" by making it more object-oriented. The reviewers of the take-home assignment will be too afraid to admit that they don't understand Haskell, too afraid to admit that they made a mistake making the language a wildcard, and automatically assume that it's less scalable because it's not Java.
- mrfusion 7y ago
  I hope they’re making way more than $50/hour in NYC.
  - NeverFade 7y ago
    Yeah, $50/hr * 200 hrs/month = 10k/month = $120k/yr = $80k post tax. Not a great income at a place where a half decent 1br can easily cost you over $40k/yr.
    - tombert 7y ago
      If you're willing to go uptown to Washington Heights or Inwood, you can get a decent two-bedroom for around $2,000-$2,500 a month, at least I was able to without too much effort. I survived for about a year with a wife (who wasn't working at the time) at $90,000/year (I was working for a university). Definitely became about a million times easier to live when I left academia and started making six figures.
      - NeverFade 7y ago
        I guess, but then your commute will become a nightmare. Either way, let's get real for a second: a software engineer is a highly trained professional working in an high-demand field. There's no reason for them to be earning $120k/yr, which is a pretty low salary in a very high CoL area like NYC.