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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 g

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
        > I guess, but then your commute will become a nightmare. I mean, not really? I just hopped onto the A train straight down to NYU; it took me like 40 minutes door to door, and being on the train allowed me to read, so it's much better than driving. I make substantially more than that now, but have moved to Brooklyn since then; door to door it takes me about 50 minutes, but I wouldn't classify that as "a nightmare". > a software engineer is a highly trained professional working in an high-demand field. At the time I was a college dropout whose only professional experience was in startups, 4/5 of which had gone bankrupt, though the university actually paid their actually-qualified people pretty poorly. My coworker had a masters degree in data-science, and was only making $75,000/year.
        7y ago
- grp000 7y ago
  I've had very similar experiences like this; the most similar was a supposed '2 to 3 hour' problem that had no time limit and no language restriction. I rushed through it (had an offer for another position with a decision deadline coming up), and it still took 12 hours. I made an error where I didn't capture all cases, which I was fine to be rejected on those grounds, but I got the exact same feedback for more modularity, and when the interviewer pointed out my 'mistake', it was clear they had no idea what the code was doing.
  - NeverFade 7y ago
    Let's think about it for a second: reading code is hard. We all know that. Reading code in "whatever language" that you may not know at all is nigh impossible. These companies get a ton of candidates and tell them all to submit homework assignments that take at least 5 hours (in your case 12). Reading 12 hours worth of coding work is intense effort even when you know the language well. If you don't, it can take a multiple of that number of hours. Some programmer got 10-20+ of these completed tasks dumped in their lap. I can pretty much guarantee they never really took the time to read and review the code with anything close to sufficient care or attention. Doubly so if it's in a language they didn't know very well.
shivawu 7y ago
You're making a good point. Bad people putting more time beat good people committing less time. This is definitely a valid point. But on the other hand, I think good professional like you, don't need to take 4-5 hours for a take home, since you'll be fine without doing it :)
- NeverFade 7y ago
  > But on the other hand, I think good professional like you, don't need to take 4-5 hours for a take home, since you'll be fine without doing it :) Thanks, but I'm a programmer, not a magician. A good programmer might work faster, but he's not able to reduce any amount of work to a constant. A good programmer may accomplish in 4 hours what an average one will accomplish in 7-8, but he will not be able to do it in 1 hour. Also, he will still seem inferior to an average programmer who took 20-25 hours to perfect this project, especially if those take-home tasks are all that other programmer does.
  - perl4ever 7y ago
    I worked with someone who was closer to a factor of ten faster than "average". I always suspected he was using performance enhancing drugs.
Legogris 7y ago
> 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. Do you mean you've gotten rejection letters straight after submission? In anything but exceptional cases I thought it was standard practice to always have an interview after the submission and talk about the solution - how you talk at the code, design choices, possible optimizations and issues should weigh heavier than the quality of the submission itself. So I don't think anyone using services doing it for them has any success with it. And if they do, you may have dodged a bullet.
- NeverFade 7y ago
  > Do you mean you've gotten rejection letters straight after submission? Yes, that definitely happens. In fact, from what I've seen, it's the norm: companies who give out homework projects only bother spending any time with you if you completed them to their satisfaction. Otherwise you just get a meaningless auto-generated that they're rejecting you. > So I don't think anyone using services doing it for them has any success with it. Why not? If I'm a mediocre programmer in the US, I can go online and buy a solution with a full, detailed verbal explanation attached. Then I'll take maybe 40 minutes to read through the solution and explanation, and voila, I'm ready for any followup session you may have.
perl4ever 7y ago
Not to criticize other people's preferences, but I have read people's gripes about things like take-home assignments and fermi estimation for years and years, and what I want to know is how I can find an employer that likes them, and hires based on them, because I both enjoy them and would like to work with people who like them.
- NeverFade 7y ago
  There's quite a few employers who like take-home assignments. However, just like GP experienced, that doesn't mean they will hire you based on take-home assignments alone. So they'll have you do one before you even come onsite. Then if you pass, they'll run you through the same whiteboard loop we all know and love. Even if your take-home performance was fantastic, they'll still reject you if your onsite performance was anything short of.
  - perl4ever 7y ago
    Yeah, I've been there and done that. I'm sure that people justify it by assuming there will otherwise be cheating on the take-home. In practice, I take jobs that don't require demonstrating anything technical in the interview. But a take-home test would only add information, not take anything away. So there is no reason in principle someone couldn't use it to hire.
    - NeverFade 7y ago
      There is, if they want to hire strong candidates in this competitive market. A candidate like that will have 10+ companies trying to recruit them. Out of these, 9 will require 1-2 hours of remote screens at most for an onsite. The 10th will require a 5-10 hour take-home project for the same onsite. Which one will the strong candidate skip?
      - perl4ever 7y ago
        I don't know, but if 10 companies are competing for one employee, then the 9 that inevitably fail obviously were using the wrong approach. You can't point to the similarities as evidence of the correct strategy, because by definition the differences were probative.

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
        > I guess, but then your commute will become a nightmare. I mean, not really? I just hopped onto the A train straight down to NYU; it took me like 40 minutes door to door, and being on the train allowed me to read, so it's much better than driving. I make substantially more than that now, but have moved to Brooklyn since then; door to door it takes me about 50 minutes, but I wouldn't classify that as "a nightmare". > a software engineer is a highly trained professional working in an high-demand field. At the time I was a college dropout whose only professional experience was in startups, 4/5 of which had gone bankrupt, though the university actually paid their actually-qualified people pretty poorly. My coworker had a masters degree in data-science, and was only making $75,000/year.
        7y ago
grp000 7y ago
I've had very similar experiences like this; the most similar was a supposed '2 to 3 hour' problem that had no time limit and no language restriction. I rushed through it (had an offer for another position with a decision deadline coming up), and it still took 12 hours. I made an error where I didn't capture all cases, which I was fine to be rejected on those grounds, but I got the exact same feedback for more modularity, and when the interviewer pointed out my 'mistake', it was clear they had no idea what the code was doing.
- NeverFade 7y ago
  Let's think about it for a second: reading code is hard. We all know that. Reading code in "whatever language" that you may not know at all is nigh impossible. These companies get a ton of candidates and tell them all to submit homework assignments that take at least 5 hours (in your case 12). Reading 12 hours worth of coding work is intense effort even when you know the language well. If you don't, it can take a multiple of that number of hours. Some programmer got 10-20+ of these completed tasks dumped in their lap. I can pretty much guarantee they never really took the time to read and review the code with anything close to sufficient care or attention. Doubly so if it's in a language they didn't know very well.

shivawu 7y ago

You're making a good point. Bad people putting more time beat good people committing less time. This is definitely a valid point. But on the other hand, I think good professional like you, don't need to take 4-5 hours for a take home, since you'll be fine without doing it :)

NeverFade 7y ago
> But on the other hand, I think good professional like you, don't need to take 4-5 hours for a take home, since you'll be fine without doing it :) Thanks, but I'm a programmer, not a magician. A good programmer might work faster, but he's not able to reduce any amount of work to a constant. A good programmer may accomplish in 4 hours what an average one will accomplish in 7-8, but he will not be able to do it in 1 hour. Also, he will still seem inferior to an average programmer who took 20-25 hours to perfect this project, especially if those take-home tasks are all that other programmer does.
- perl4ever 7y ago
  I worked with someone who was closer to a factor of ten faster than "average". I always suspected he was using performance enhancing drugs.

Legogris 7y ago

> 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. Do you mean you've gotten rejection letters straight after submission? In anything but exceptional cases I thought it was standard practice to always have an interview after the submission and talk about the solution - how you talk at the code, design choices, possible optimizations and issues should weigh heavier than the quality of the submission itself. So I don't think anyone using services doing it for them has any success with it. And if they do, you may have dodged a bullet.

NeverFade 7y ago
> Do you mean you've gotten rejection letters straight after submission? Yes, that definitely happens. In fact, from what I've seen, it's the norm: companies who give out homework projects only bother spending any time with you if you completed them to their satisfaction. Otherwise you just get a meaningless auto-generated that they're rejecting you. > So I don't think anyone using services doing it for them has any success with it. Why not? If I'm a mediocre programmer in the US, I can go online and buy a solution with a full, detailed verbal explanation attached. Then I'll take maybe 40 minutes to read through the solution and explanation, and voila, I'm ready for any followup session you may have.

perl4ever 7y ago

Not to criticize other people's preferences, but I have read people's gripes about things like take-home assignments and fermi estimation for years and years, and what I want to know is how I can find an employer that likes them, and hires based on them, because I both enjoy them and would like to work with people who like them.

NeverFade 7y ago
There's quite a few employers who like take-home assignments. However, just like GP experienced, that doesn't mean they will hire you based on take-home assignments alone. So they'll have you do one before you even come onsite. Then if you pass, they'll run you through the same whiteboard loop we all know and love. Even if your take-home performance was fantastic, they'll still reject you if your onsite performance was anything short of.
- perl4ever 7y ago
  Yeah, I've been there and done that. I'm sure that people justify it by assuming there will otherwise be cheating on the take-home. In practice, I take jobs that don't require demonstrating anything technical in the interview. But a take-home test would only add information, not take anything away. So there is no reason in principle someone couldn't use it to hire.
  - NeverFade 7y ago
    There is, if they want to hire strong candidates in this competitive market. A candidate like that will have 10+ companies trying to recruit them. Out of these, 9 will require 1-2 hours of remote screens at most for an onsite. The 10th will require a 5-10 hour take-home project for the same onsite. Which one will the strong candidate skip?
    - perl4ever 7y ago
      I don't know, but if 10 companies are competing for one employee, then the 9 that inevitably fail obviously were using the wrong approach. You can't point to the similarities as evidence of the correct strategy, because by definition the differences were probative.