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Yes yes yes: 4. Don’t give me any bullshit homework. I have a thousands of lines of open source software, created over 8 years of doing open source work... it

Yes yes yes: 4. Don’t give me any bullshit homework. I have a thousands of lines of open source software, created over 8 years of doing open source work... it really does feel like a waste of time when a potential employeer asks me to spend "2 days coding up this thing in C++" as an entrance exam.

t3mp3st 15y ago
Hells yes. The worst is when they ask you to build something for their product. For free. On your own time. And then don't give you the job. WTF?
lpolovets 15y ago
Ok, I'll bite. In the same way that you might be applying for many jobs, the employer has to sort through many applicants. A "bullshit homework" exercise is a great way to get a calibrated measure of an applicant's abilities and code quality. It's also a great opportunity for the applicant to show off: you can write awesome documentation, implement several variations of an algorithm to see which works best, add unit tests, etc. You can also half-ass the exercise and submit something that works but is mediocre in most ways. Of course, you would not want to spend 4 hours on a problem for each of 50 job applications, but you might pick 2-3 companies that really interest you and spend more time on those. As luck would have it, those are the ones you'll most likely get offers from once you dazzle on the code test. Open source code is awesome, and I really enjoy looking at people's GitHub pages, but it's hard to learn what you need to learn from those pages. If it's a solo project, I know that the person wrote all of the code, but many times it's not and I don't want to run "blame" on each file. It's also unclear if the code I'm looking at is an example of the person's "best" work, or what how they program day-to-day, or something else. Furthermore, the code could be in Haskell or C# or Jython or whatever, which might have nothing to do with what I'm looking for.* On another note, the employer runs a big risk when hiring someone. They are potentially paying salary, benefits, relocation expenses, etc. If they're wrong, they lose a lot of money, team morale goes down, and they might have to spend time cleaning up after bad work instead of implementing new stuff. Asking for a small homework assignment seems like a reasonable request when the consequences of a false positive are so dramatic. Finally, a coding test likely means one of the following: 1) the company has so many applicants that they want to set up a wall that only the really interested applicants get through. 2) the company has high standards and wants to make sure they are not making stupid hiring mistakes. I think both of these are pros rather than cons for a potential employer. Just my two cents.. * I realize that a good developer can learn any language, but if I'm interested in technology X, and a developer knows X and Y, then it's not as interesting to me to see what they have open sourced with Y as it would be to see what they can do with X.

t3mp3st 15y ago

Hells yes. The worst is when they ask you to build something for their product. For free. On your own time. And then don't give you the job. WTF?

lpolovets 15y ago

Ok, I'll bite. In the same way that you might be applying for many jobs, the employer has to sort through many applicants. A "bullshit homework" exercise is a great way to get a calibrated measure of an applicant's abilities and code quality. It's also a great opportunity for the applicant to show off: you can write awesome documentation, implement several variations of an algorithm to see which works best, add unit tests, etc. You can also half-ass the exercise and submit something that works but is mediocre in most ways. Of course, you would not want to spend 4 hours on a problem for each of 50 job applications, but you might pick 2-3 companies that really interest you and spend more time on those. As luck would have it, those are the ones you'll most likely get offers from once you dazzle on the code test. Open source code is awesome, and I really enjoy looking at people's GitHub pages, but it's hard to learn what you need to learn from those pages. If it's a solo project, I know that the person wrote all of the code, but many times it's not and I don't want to run "blame" on each file. It's also unclear if the code I'm looking at is an example of the person's "best" work, or what how they program day-to-day, or something else. Furthermore, the code could be in Haskell or C# or Jython or whatever, which might have nothing to do with what I'm looking for.* On another note, the employer runs a big risk when hiring someone. They are potentially paying salary, benefits, relocation expenses, etc. If they're wrong, they lose a lot of money, team morale goes down, and they might have to spend time cleaning up after bad work instead of implementing new stuff. Asking for a small homework assignment seems like a reasonable request when the consequences of a false positive are so dramatic. Finally, a coding test likely means one of the following: 1) the company has so many applicants that they want to set up a wall that only the really interested applicants get through. 2) the company has high standards and wants to make sure they are not making stupid hiring mistakes. I think both of these are pros rather than cons for a potential employer. Just my two cents.. * I realize that a good developer can learn any language, but if I'm interested in technology X, and a developer knows X and Y, then it's not as interesting to me to see what they have open sourced with Y as it would be to see what they can do with X.