5 ms·

How do you feel about paying candidates for the time they spend on the assignment?

lukey_q 6y ago
I created a similar task at my company as the parent commenter, building a small frontend to an existing API that can be completed in a couple of hours. There's no time limit for turning it in (we suggest two weeks but don't enforce it) and we specifically tell people that a good, concise solution to the problem at hand is perfectly fine, and even might be better than a sloppier solution that tries to add bells and whistles. When I set it up the goal was to avoid a lot of the issues I've personally had or heard about with coding challenges: they take way too long, they're too abstract, or you feel like the company might just be using you to get a couple of days of free work on their actual codebase. For this reason I feel fine about not paying people, as it's just a small part of the application process and not free work for us. I think it's worked pretty well so far. It happens after the initial phone screen and before the first technical interview. We send people the challenge, they return it whenever they want, and if we like it we set up a technical interview. Since the challenge uses our tech stack and is similar to the work we actually do, a large part of the first technical interview is discussing their solution. Why they chose certain patterns, why they added a certain library, how they'd consider testing it, why a certain function might be slow with 10k entities, and so on.
Polylactic_acid 6y ago
I once applied at a company that started with a programming test before any human communication. I think I did a pretty good job on the test. After that I was rejected when I assume they saw my resume. They gave me $50 store credit on their website (custom sticker printing). I assume it cost them a lot less than $50 but it was still pretty cool.
- justinlloyd 6y ago
  This past week one of the companies on "who's hiring" sent me three challenges that "would only take 2 hours" before I ever got to talk to a human being or even got a human being responding with an email. This was a fully automated system apparently. "Take this programming test, we'll let you know if you're good enough to talk with a human." Whilst the challenges were not particularly complex, you also had to ensure that the person who was going to run your code could stand up your environment, so part of the second challenge was "thoroughly document how to run your code, the environment needed, etc, etc." Life is too short to deal with this kind of stonewalling.
  - collyw 6y ago
    We (the whole developer community) really need to stop responding to such companies. I did one recently after the initial HR person chat. I spent a morning on it as they suggested 2 or 3 hours. But then I was rejected for the most pedantic reasons (2 white space PEP violations), not setting up mocks for testing (that would have doubled the scope of the project). Providing an HTML response rather than JSON when the spec asked for a "page, don't bother about styling". And various other trivialities. I tried passing on my complaints, but the HR girls didn't like that. Pretty disrespectful after giving up a morning of my free time. Sennder is the company, as I feel that we should be naming and shaming.
    - VonGallifrey 6y ago
      I just completed this exact challenge (Yes, for Sennder) and I think their challenge is fine. It is not really difficult or takes much time at all. They didn't seem too strict in their review and I was able to discuss some of the "mistakes" and choices I made in the tech interview. Including some PEP8 violations. Despite these mistakes I passed the tech interview just fine and I just have the CTO interview left. I don't see how mocks would have doubled the scope of the project. I think I have mocks set up in a few lines of code or so. If your project is so difficult to test or if it is difficult to set up mocks for it maybe there is a serious flaw in your project structure? > Providing an HTML response rather than JSON when the spec asked for a "page, don't bother about styling". I don't understand what you mean with this. Did you provide a HTML response or did you provide JSON? I did a super simple HTML response with no styling and that was fine. If you did JSON I could see how they would mark it as a mistake when they clearly asked for a HTML page.
      - collyw 6y ago
        They did say that they were planning on changing it so maybe you got a different one. I gave them HTML, and they claimed that "JSON would have been better" despite the specification asking for a "page" with "no need for styling".
    - caymanjim 6y ago
azangru 6y ago
I would feel bad about it. You don't normally pay candidates for the time they spend doing the whiteboard interview, do you? You can view the take-home task as a replacement of the whiteboarding session, equally with no pecuniary obligations for the candidate.
- cutemonster 6y ago
  Another thing, what if it seems some people just want the money, and didn't try seriously Then what? Would it feel good to pay

I created a similar task at my company as the parent commenter, building a small frontend to an existing API that can be completed in a couple of hours. There's no time limit for turning it in (we suggest two weeks but don't enforce it) and we specifically tell people that a good, concise solution to the problem at hand is perfectly fine, and even might be better than a sloppier solution that tries to add bells and whistles. When I set it up the goal was to avoid a lot of the issues I've personally had or heard about with coding challenges: they take way too long, they're too abstract, or you feel like the company might just be using you to get a couple of days of free work on their actual codebase. For this reason I feel fine about not paying people, as it's just a small part of the application process and not free work for us. I think it's worked pretty well so far. It happens after the initial phone screen and before the first technical interview. We send people the challenge, they return it whenever they want, and if we like it we set up a technical interview. Since the challenge uses our tech stack and is similar to the work we actually do, a large part of the first technical interview is discussing their solution. Why they chose certain patterns, why they added a certain library, how they'd consider testing it, why a certain function might be slow with 10k entities, and so on.

Polylactic_acid 6y ago

I once applied at a company that started with a programming test before any human communication. I think I did a pretty good job on the test. After that I was rejected when I assume they saw my resume. They gave me $50 store credit on their website (custom sticker printing). I assume it cost them a lot less than $50 but it was still pretty cool.

justinlloyd 6y ago
This past week one of the companies on "who's hiring" sent me three challenges that "would only take 2 hours" before I ever got to talk to a human being or even got a human being responding with an email. This was a fully automated system apparently. "Take this programming test, we'll let you know if you're good enough to talk with a human." Whilst the challenges were not particularly complex, you also had to ensure that the person who was going to run your code could stand up your environment, so part of the second challenge was "thoroughly document how to run your code, the environment needed, etc, etc." Life is too short to deal with this kind of stonewalling.
- collyw 6y ago
  We (the whole developer community) really need to stop responding to such companies. I did one recently after the initial HR person chat. I spent a morning on it as they suggested 2 or 3 hours. But then I was rejected for the most pedantic reasons (2 white space PEP violations), not setting up mocks for testing (that would have doubled the scope of the project). Providing an HTML response rather than JSON when the spec asked for a "page, don't bother about styling". And various other trivialities. I tried passing on my complaints, but the HR girls didn't like that. Pretty disrespectful after giving up a morning of my free time. Sennder is the company, as I feel that we should be naming and shaming.
  - VonGallifrey 6y ago
    I just completed this exact challenge (Yes, for Sennder) and I think their challenge is fine. It is not really difficult or takes much time at all. They didn't seem too strict in their review and I was able to discuss some of the "mistakes" and choices I made in the tech interview. Including some PEP8 violations. Despite these mistakes I passed the tech interview just fine and I just have the CTO interview left. I don't see how mocks would have doubled the scope of the project. I think I have mocks set up in a few lines of code or so. If your project is so difficult to test or if it is difficult to set up mocks for it maybe there is a serious flaw in your project structure? > Providing an HTML response rather than JSON when the spec asked for a "page, don't bother about styling". I don't understand what you mean with this. Did you provide a HTML response or did you provide JSON? I did a super simple HTML response with no styling and that was fine. If you did JSON I could see how they would mark it as a mistake when they clearly asked for a HTML page.
    - collyw 6y ago
      They did say that they were planning on changing it so maybe you got a different one. I gave them HTML, and they claimed that "JSON would have been better" despite the specification asking for a "page" with "no need for styling".
  - caymanjim 6y ago

azangru 6y ago

I would feel bad about it. You don't normally pay candidates for the time they spend doing the whiteboard interview, do you? You can view the take-home task as a replacement of the whiteboarding session, equally with no pecuniary obligations for the candidate.

cutemonster 6y ago
Another thing, what if it seems some people just want the money, and didn't try seriously Then what? Would it feel good to pay