6 ms·

Reminds me of how some companies give take-home assignments to job candidates. > Here's a task that takes a day to do sloppily and at least two days for you to

by jstx1 5y ago

Reminds me of how some companies give take-home assignments to job candidates. > Here's a task that takes a day to do sloppily and at least two days for you to show your best work. We want to be respectful of your time so please don't spend more than 2 hours on it.

nnoitra 5y ago
Yup, the worst aspect of it isn't that it takes a long time to make it work right but the feeling of imposter syndrome and the fear of expectations if one manages to get in. Like, if you expect me to write 1K lines of code in 2 hours as I read documentation, debug, test it - then god knows what the expectations are at a full day at work.
sildur 5y ago
I only accept paired assignments. If you are going to use my time, the least you can do is offer an equal amount of time on your side.
- nextlevelwizard 5y ago
  "Thank you for your time, we will keep you in mind. Next!" Point of programming assignment is to see if you can actually write code. No one is waiting for perfect implementation, just working code that fills the spec, documentation, and tests.
  - wongarsu 5y ago
    "here's a computer, please implement a function in $languageOnYouCV that receives two words and returns true if they are anagrams of each other, false otherwise, if time permits add some unit tests" seems to fulfill that need just as well, and should be quick enough that being in the room or not is more about what makes the candidate more comfortable and gives the most insight for the interviewer.
    - sethammons 5y ago
      That is where we interviewed as an industry 10 years ago. Then people noticed a few holes (what, they don't know fundamental $x!?) and those were filled. List vs map, complexity, tests, trees and traversal, http api stuffs, unixy things, and then into networking fundamentals, distributed systems stuff, etc. 10 years ago, nearly no candidate pulled a distributed queue solution in a design interview and now it is a standard answer in their pocket.
    - sdiupIGPWEfh 5y ago
      That sort of problem is about the right level of complexity for a candidate to show they can think about a problem, provide an implementation, and discuss alternatives. Something they should be able to do without ever studying or grinding LeetCode. However, there's always room for the interviewer to muck things up. For the anagram problem, there are a range of solutions, including elegant & inefficient, clever & efficient, and robust & efficient. Do you dock someone depending on which they reach for first? There's limited time, and a candidate may assume you're mostly interested in "how they think" and thus focus on the algorithm alone. After the interview, do you run the candidate's solution against test cases that you never mentioned, docking them for "missing" matters of casing or non-alphabetic characters? If the candidate themselves wrote unit tests, do you dock them for missing test cases you felt should have been included? Do you dock them for not checking for invalid inputs, even though the candidate might normally work in a type checked variant of the language that wouldn't have permitted that anyway? So many possible hidden assumptions. I know I've been rejected for similar unstated expectations in the past, and in retrospect, I know I've been guilty of doing the same to others.
      - htrp 5y ago
        At that point it's not a coding exercise, it's a full blown case study. This isn't a programming contest and your company isn't ACM
    - easymodex 5y ago
      Is the candidate allowed to use google? Just asking since it's a very easy task but I'd wanna doublecheck how to reverse a string in that language.
  - sildur 5y ago
    It helps me on filtering out shitty companies. I don't want to work in a place that does not value my time. And there are plenty of companies to work with.
- agent327 5y ago
  How does this work? Who is the other party (someone from the company?) and what do they contribute?
  - bosie 5y ago
    They contribute the evaluation and time-boxing
ThalesX 5y ago
I wonder if that's why I wasn't a good fit for a recent company I interviewed with using a take-home assignment... bear in mind it's been at least a decade since I last took a take-home, so things might have changed. I received the task on Friday evening, I spent the week-end thinking about the problem. Monday I had actual work and on Tuesday, I spent a day coming up with a shit implementation. Then, I started improving it for two days until I think it got in a good shape. I basically wanted to transmit that I can start from the base, add functionality and then iterate on the problem by documenting, refactoring, adding tests, evolving the code base etc. So I'd say I worked for around 24 hours over 168 hours and the feedback I got was: > Thank you so much for your interest in joining <redacted> and the time you took to submit the coding challenge. In reviewing your application though, I have decided not to invite you to the next round of interviews as I believe there are other candidates that are a better fit for what <redacted> needs right now. This is turning into a subjective rant, part of me wants to delete this but I'm just gonna go ahead and finish it; When I was younger, I used to love take-home assignments because it felt better than just doing algorithms, and then I used to get proper feedback, what I did wrong, what aspects I could improve in the future etc. This feedback gives me nothing. Just the realization I wasted time.
- chiefalchemist 5y ago
  I had a take home a couple months ago. I'll spare you the details but if the output was to be non-hacky it was 4 or 5 days of work. I put in ~20 hrs, sent it back and said, "Here's where I'm at. I'd love to finish it but it's not reasonable to expect so much time if the final answer might be 'No thanks.' I'm not into such waterfalls..." To this I'll add, I have a saying: "How you hire, is who you hire." 40 hrs? Waterfall? 2021?? And we all have been led to believe dinosaurs are extinct :)
- icythere 5y ago
  Same here. Quite a long time ago I got a take-home assignment. It's about setting up a router on a linux-based machine. I was going with a design that focused on maintenance and understanding, so I decided not to use iptables directly. After a few days I gave up, because there was an issue with the upstream distribution that I was not aware of. I actually had a very good setup after the _deadline_, but it's too late. I would never do take-home assignment again =))
fumblebee 5y ago
The take-home assignment seems to me a slightly broken system; it's easily gameable because there's zero supervision. Let's say there's two candidates for a position who are both asked to complete the take-home assignment, Candidate A and Candidate B. Candidate A is the superior candidate and spends only two hours on the task (as requested), and Candidate B spends 2 days. Candidate B submits the better assignment and is more likely to land the job as a result, despite Candidate A being the better candidate.
- TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  Sounds like there may be a niche for some kind of industry standard automated logging system. Nothing complicated - shouldn't take too long.
  - rightbyte 5y ago
    Are you joking? Should candidates install spyware?
    - drstewart 5y ago
      Seems obviously a joke based on the project from the article
- sverhagen 5y ago
  When I've interviewed using homework like this, it was with the sole purpose of bringing it along and talking to it. That won't be gamed. And, by the way, that lends itself also very well for bringing whatever fitted in the time box, and having a discussion on the meeting about the tasks that remain, and about their prioritization process. You may like it when you see less production code, in favor of some tests! People coming in with a full-fletched solution, and then to tell me they didn't have time for a test, what am I to make from that?
  - htrp 5y ago
    This is the right approach. You don't disqualify based on the take home (unless it doesn't work at all).

by jstx1 5y ago

nnoitra 5y ago

Yup, the worst aspect of it isn't that it takes a long time to make it work right but the feeling of imposter syndrome and the fear of expectations if one manages to get in. Like, if you expect me to write 1K lines of code in 2 hours as I read documentation, debug, test it - then god knows what the expectations are at a full day at work.

sildur 5y ago

I only accept paired assignments. If you are going to use my time, the least you can do is offer an equal amount of time on your side.

nextlevelwizard 5y ago
"Thank you for your time, we will keep you in mind. Next!" Point of programming assignment is to see if you can actually write code. No one is waiting for perfect implementation, just working code that fills the spec, documentation, and tests.
- wongarsu 5y ago
  "here's a computer, please implement a function in $languageOnYouCV that receives two words and returns true if they are anagrams of each other, false otherwise, if time permits add some unit tests" seems to fulfill that need just as well, and should be quick enough that being in the room or not is more about what makes the candidate more comfortable and gives the most insight for the interviewer.
  - sethammons 5y ago
    That is where we interviewed as an industry 10 years ago. Then people noticed a few holes (what, they don't know fundamental $x!?) and those were filled. List vs map, complexity, tests, trees and traversal, http api stuffs, unixy things, and then into networking fundamentals, distributed systems stuff, etc. 10 years ago, nearly no candidate pulled a distributed queue solution in a design interview and now it is a standard answer in their pocket.
  - sdiupIGPWEfh 5y ago
    That sort of problem is about the right level of complexity for a candidate to show they can think about a problem, provide an implementation, and discuss alternatives. Something they should be able to do without ever studying or grinding LeetCode. However, there's always room for the interviewer to muck things up. For the anagram problem, there are a range of solutions, including elegant & inefficient, clever & efficient, and robust & efficient. Do you dock someone depending on which they reach for first? There's limited time, and a candidate may assume you're mostly interested in "how they think" and thus focus on the algorithm alone. After the interview, do you run the candidate's solution against test cases that you never mentioned, docking them for "missing" matters of casing or non-alphabetic characters? If the candidate themselves wrote unit tests, do you dock them for missing test cases you felt should have been included? Do you dock them for not checking for invalid inputs, even though the candidate might normally work in a type checked variant of the language that wouldn't have permitted that anyway? So many possible hidden assumptions. I know I've been rejected for similar unstated expectations in the past, and in retrospect, I know I've been guilty of doing the same to others.
    - htrp 5y ago
      At that point it's not a coding exercise, it's a full blown case study. This isn't a programming contest and your company isn't ACM
  - easymodex 5y ago
    Is the candidate allowed to use google? Just asking since it's a very easy task but I'd wanna doublecheck how to reverse a string in that language.
- sildur 5y ago
  It helps me on filtering out shitty companies. I don't want to work in a place that does not value my time. And there are plenty of companies to work with.
agent327 5y ago
How does this work? Who is the other party (someone from the company?) and what do they contribute?
- bosie 5y ago
  They contribute the evaluation and time-boxing

ThalesX 5y ago

I wonder if that's why I wasn't a good fit for a recent company I interviewed with using a take-home assignment... bear in mind it's been at least a decade since I last took a take-home, so things might have changed. I received the task on Friday evening, I spent the week-end thinking about the problem. Monday I had actual work and on Tuesday, I spent a day coming up with a shit implementation. Then, I started improving it for two days until I think it got in a good shape. I basically wanted to transmit that I can start from the base, add functionality and then iterate on the problem by documenting, refactoring, adding tests, evolving the code base etc. So I'd say I worked for around 24 hours over 168 hours and the feedback I got was: > Thank you so much for your interest in joining <redacted> and the time you took to submit the coding challenge. In reviewing your application though, I have decided not to invite you to the next round of interviews as I believe there are other candidates that are a better fit for what <redacted> needs right now. This is turning into a subjective rant, part of me wants to delete this but I'm just gonna go ahead and finish it; When I was younger, I used to love take-home assignments because it felt better than just doing algorithms, and then I used to get proper feedback, what I did wrong, what aspects I could improve in the future etc. This feedback gives me nothing. Just the realization I wasted time.

chiefalchemist 5y ago
I had a take home a couple months ago. I'll spare you the details but if the output was to be non-hacky it was 4 or 5 days of work. I put in ~20 hrs, sent it back and said, "Here's where I'm at. I'd love to finish it but it's not reasonable to expect so much time if the final answer might be 'No thanks.' I'm not into such waterfalls..." To this I'll add, I have a saying: "How you hire, is who you hire." 40 hrs? Waterfall? 2021?? And we all have been led to believe dinosaurs are extinct :)
icythere 5y ago
Same here. Quite a long time ago I got a take-home assignment. It's about setting up a router on a linux-based machine. I was going with a design that focused on maintenance and understanding, so I decided not to use iptables directly. After a few days I gave up, because there was an issue with the upstream distribution that I was not aware of. I actually had a very good setup after the _deadline_, but it's too late. I would never do take-home assignment again =))

fumblebee 5y ago

The take-home assignment seems to me a slightly broken system; it's easily gameable because there's zero supervision. Let's say there's two candidates for a position who are both asked to complete the take-home assignment, Candidate A and Candidate B. Candidate A is the superior candidate and spends only two hours on the task (as requested), and Candidate B spends 2 days. Candidate B submits the better assignment and is more likely to land the job as a result, despite Candidate A being the better candidate.

TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
Sounds like there may be a niche for some kind of industry standard automated logging system. Nothing complicated - shouldn't take too long.
- rightbyte 5y ago
  Are you joking? Should candidates install spyware?
  - drstewart 5y ago
    Seems obviously a joke based on the project from the article
sverhagen 5y ago
When I've interviewed using homework like this, it was with the sole purpose of bringing it along and talking to it. That won't be gamed. And, by the way, that lends itself also very well for bringing whatever fitted in the time box, and having a discussion on the meeting about the tasks that remain, and about their prioritization process. You may like it when you see less production code, in favor of some tests! People coming in with a full-fletched solution, and then to tell me they didn't have time for a test, what am I to make from that?
- htrp 5y ago
  This is the right approach. You don't disqualify based on the take home (unless it doesn't work at all).