6 ms·

Homework, you say? I've walked out on interviews that demanded this sort of homework before. I told them 'professionally' that their idea of demanding 4h of my

Homework, you say? I've walked out on interviews that demanded this sort of homework before. I told them 'professionally' that their idea of demanding 4h of my time after 3 rounds was farcical and insulting. Ditch the homework completely, or tell about the homework up front. Compensate - I don't work for free. And if you want a fair assessment, put me in contact with 1 of your engineers or devs and lets talk out a problem. Or review my body of work in that thing called a "resume". If you have multiple bad hires that lied about skills they didn't have, then perhaps you ought to reconsider who is doing the hiring decisions. That's been a big one in previous orgs I've worked in. The hiring group was static, upper managerial level, and didn't understand the problem domains of the positions they were hiring for.

visarga 5y ago
> I've walked out on interviews that demanded this sort of homework before. I told them 'professionally' that their idea of demanding 4h of my time after 3 rounds was farcical and insulting. Haven't you read the parent post? Most people who claimed to be senior were "scary bad". In my interviewing experience it was the same - one qualified candidate in 10.
Spivak 5y ago
There's a lot of assumptions in this post. 1. We tell candidates about the homework during the phone screen which is about 20 minutes, if they want to duck after that no time wasted. No one ever has. 2. We don't compensate for it since it's the 3rd interview. The idea that I can take 4 hours of your time for a half-day whiteboard interview but not a "do a simple task that should take 30 minutes at your leisure" is weird. We've never had anyone have an issue with it because we have the one of the least intensive interview processes in the area. 3. People lie or vastly overestimate their skills on the resume, surprise. If you submit code samples or your Github is good enough then we skip the homework. Designers/artists have it right with the "portfolio" -- resumes are very nearly worthless. We don't demand code samples or FOSS projects because we don't want to assume people code after hours and obviously can't share code they wrote at work but in that case we need an alternative. 3. You are interviewed by the team you would be working with. There is no hiring group. You have contact with all the engineers. You can even talk over the assignment with the team at the end of the second interview.
- tuckerpo 5y ago
  > Here, do this work for free during your own time for a _chance_ at Yet Another Interview Round Nah, I'm all set.
  - Spivak 5y ago
    You have basically articulated why it's the last thing.
- gyulai 5y ago
  > resumes are very nearly worthless Sorry for being incendiary, but this hits me as a recent trend that is nothing short of insane. I went to a top-ranked university on the highest-paid scholarship I was eligible for, got a Ph. D. there, then got the job that all my peers wanted but only a handful actually got. Then I booked 10 years of industry experience. -- You wouldn't believe the life sacrifices I've made to be able to have all of that on my resume. If someone tells me that's all "worthless" and they'd rather ask some stupid puzzle questions and see some indication of how passionate I am about working for some no-name company, or whatever the latest hype is, then that's simply where the interview ends for me.
  - visarga 5y ago
    Your PhD is only useful if you go for a job in your specific sub-field. If you have a PhD in physics it doesn't mean you can code your way out of a hat. In fact scientist types have very poor coding practices on average. I once had an interview with a scientist turned to industry who couldn't demonstrate how to load a text file after 30 minutes of trying. I mean, what should I have done with him? The position required lots of algorithms and data processing.
    - gyulai 5y ago
      That's a prejudice that you're supporting with anecdata. Saying "PhDs make bad programmers" is not any different in that regard from saying "women make bad programmers". But at least you're agreeing with me that resumes are not worthless ;-) ...as, apparently, you find them useful for screening out people with PhDs who therefore make bad programmers. The fact is that there is such a thing as an "impressive resume". There seem to be people out there eager to dismiss the value of those. Frequently an explanation will be that they themselves don't have one and are engaging in cognitive dissonance reduction. In fact, one can say more generally that psychological forces will act powerfully in such a way as to make hiring managers want to hire people who are just like them, even when they themselves are worse than the best candidates they could hire. That's the reason why having an analytically well-reflected hiring process, instead of just hiring who you like, is important, and resumes have an important role to play in that.

visarga 5y ago

> I've walked out on interviews that demanded this sort of homework before. I told them 'professionally' that their idea of demanding 4h of my time after 3 rounds was farcical and insulting. Haven't you read the parent post? Most people who claimed to be senior were "scary bad". In my interviewing experience it was the same - one qualified candidate in 10.

Spivak 5y ago

There's a lot of assumptions in this post. 1. We tell candidates about the homework during the phone screen which is about 20 minutes, if they want to duck after that no time wasted. No one ever has. 2. We don't compensate for it since it's the 3rd interview. The idea that I can take 4 hours of your time for a half-day whiteboard interview but not a "do a simple task that should take 30 minutes at your leisure" is weird. We've never had anyone have an issue with it because we have the one of the least intensive interview processes in the area. 3. People lie or vastly overestimate their skills on the resume, surprise. If you submit code samples or your Github is good enough then we skip the homework. Designers/artists have it right with the "portfolio" -- resumes are very nearly worthless. We don't demand code samples or FOSS projects because we don't want to assume people code after hours and obviously can't share code they wrote at work but in that case we need an alternative. 3. You are interviewed by the team you would be working with. There is no hiring group. You have contact with all the engineers. You can even talk over the assignment with the team at the end of the second interview.

tuckerpo 5y ago
> Here, do this work for free during your own time for a _chance_ at Yet Another Interview Round Nah, I'm all set.
- Spivak 5y ago
  You have basically articulated why it's the last thing.
gyulai 5y ago
> resumes are very nearly worthless Sorry for being incendiary, but this hits me as a recent trend that is nothing short of insane. I went to a top-ranked university on the highest-paid scholarship I was eligible for, got a Ph. D. there, then got the job that all my peers wanted but only a handful actually got. Then I booked 10 years of industry experience. -- You wouldn't believe the life sacrifices I've made to be able to have all of that on my resume. If someone tells me that's all "worthless" and they'd rather ask some stupid puzzle questions and see some indication of how passionate I am about working for some no-name company, or whatever the latest hype is, then that's simply where the interview ends for me.
- visarga 5y ago
  Your PhD is only useful if you go for a job in your specific sub-field. If you have a PhD in physics it doesn't mean you can code your way out of a hat. In fact scientist types have very poor coding practices on average. I once had an interview with a scientist turned to industry who couldn't demonstrate how to load a text file after 30 minutes of trying. I mean, what should I have done with him? The position required lots of algorithms and data processing.
  - gyulai 5y ago
    That's a prejudice that you're supporting with anecdata. Saying "PhDs make bad programmers" is not any different in that regard from saying "women make bad programmers". But at least you're agreeing with me that resumes are not worthless ;-) ...as, apparently, you find them useful for screening out people with PhDs who therefore make bad programmers. The fact is that there is such a thing as an "impressive resume". There seem to be people out there eager to dismiss the value of those. Frequently an explanation will be that they themselves don't have one and are engaging in cognitive dissonance reduction. In fact, one can say more generally that psychological forces will act powerfully in such a way as to make hiring managers want to hire people who are just like them, even when they themselves are worse than the best candidates they could hire. That's the reason why having an analytically well-reflected hiring process, instead of just hiring who you like, is important, and resumes have an important role to play in that.