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Take-home tests are fine in isolation, but if every company does that you'd pretty much be spending all your time doing take-home projects and nothing else. Al
by danjac 6y ago
Take-home tests are fine in isolation, but if every company does that you'd pretty much be spending all your time doing take-home projects and nothing else.
Also many companies will insist on a take home project in addition to everything else, including a whiteboard interview. So you can pour time and effort into this project only to be eliminated further down the line (or just ghosted).
It's like they assume applicants are applying to one job at a time and have no other work or life commitments.
I dunno, it feels like the tech industry has forgotten how to interview candidates, as in "just chat with someone like a normal human being to see if they are a good fit for what you need", and like many other aspects of the profession have fallen for dumb processes, fads, cargo-culting, outsourcing to third parties, and dubious technical solutions in lieu of experience and social interaction. I learned this early in my career, and found I can pretty much size up someone's technical chops - assuming they're in my wheelhouse - and get a good idea of their professionalism - with a short, half hour phone/Zoom interview. Yes, I can see how this might lend itself to bias and prejudice, but it seems the solution there is to train interviewers to overcome biases and have more diversity (in all senses of the word) in your interviewing team.
- bananaface 6y agoJust look at their GitHub and if it looks good, dive in at the interview to make sure they actually wrote the code. Isolated take-home tests seem ridiculous to me if the candidate has public code available. You're filtering out anyone who likes to avoid duplicated effort.
- rocqua 6y agoRequiring github as a CV is worse from the POV of not forcing people to spend a lot of time outside work programming. Not everyone has the inclination or time to code outside of work. Many of these people are still very competent developers.
- danjac 6y agoIf a person has some interesting Github activity (that they can back up) I would certainly discuss it with them. If I'm hiring for a Django developer and the candidate has contributed to the Django core or a related library, that would be a strong signal - but it should not be a requirement. A strong candidate is typically a mixture of good work history, side projects, hobbies and interests, personality and other things that indicate they would be a good fit for your team. How much and in what way depends on the job and the person. Maybe the startup company needs a person who does lots of side projects, builds stuff on their own etc because you need self-starters that don't require lots of hand holding and are ready to take the initiative to learn. On the other hand your 1000-strong engineering subdivision at big corp needs more heads-down 9-5ers who just produce reliable output. Maybe the things you ask a junior dev out of college are different to what you would ask a mid-career developer. There's no one size fits all approach that people seem to be looking for.
- bananaface 6y agoSure, that's why I said "if" - if they don't have a public presence then give them a test. But frankly I don't really buy that excuse. Those people have time for multiple coding tests but they don't have time for a (small) public project? Ehhh. Not convinced. If you can get away with no portfolio to begin with then you're not going to be inclined to accept coding assignments.
- GordonS 6y agoI don't think you should require GitHub, but if a candidate came to me with projects on GitHub I'd skip all technical aspects of the interview, since they have already demonstrated their technical ability.