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Personally, I've never found it difficult. Have 1-2 interviews with a take home or in person coding exercise or however they want to prove to me they can actual

• sys_64738 4y ago
  You lost me at "with a take home". I'm not interested in your silly games.
  • gsibble 4y ago
    Ok. What would you suggest instead? I need to know you can, you know, actually code.
    • sys_64738 4y ago
      I know that code and that’s what the resume says.
    • pjmlp 4y ago
      Ask about project work, and real technical questions. Many of us have a real life, and enough offers to chose from.
      • gsibble 4y ago
        Sorry, but neither of those things show me that you know how to code. I don't know how long it took you to write your projects so you may be very slow and a terrible coder. Technical questions you may have prepped from a book. I need to see active coding, either live, in person, over zoom, or time boxed in a take home. We'll even compensate you for your time. But I need to see you actually working and review your work. Sorry. Quite frankly, relying upon such things is a sure-fire way to make sure some bad developers get through the cracks.
        • pjmlp 4y ago
          No need to be sorry, I wouldn't apply to your company, and you would be lucky to even get a reply from me if contacting me on the typical social networks for developers. Sorry.
          • gsibble 4y ago
            No worries. Sounds like we wouldn't want you anyways if you have such poor work ethic.
            • pjmlp 4y ago
              There are plenty of fish in the sea....
              • sys_64738 4y ago
                Tell us who you are and what your company is. You truly sound like a terrible employer based on your shocking responses. You came here to ask for feedback and then when you got it you didn't like it. You are clearly the issue of why you can't hire developers. I'd wish you good luck but I won't.
                • gsibble 4y ago
                  We're a terrible employer? Let me tell you what kind of employer we are. We pay top 1% of market. We work to have a low stress environment. We put life before work instead of work before life. We prioritize having the best benefits on the market, including platinum health care with $0 employee contribution and full mental health coverage for therapy and medication not covered through insurance. We don't overload our top performers by giving them more work when they overperform but instead let them take the extra time off. We give everyone when they join a private office and an unlimited budget to buy tech and decorate it to their heart's desire. We don't have required hours in the office or even require that people come to the office at all. Most people do though since they enjoy their nicely decorated private offices with multiple high end monitors and tricked out desktops. Which part of that makes us a terrible employer? That we ask people for an hour of their time to do a coding exercise? Is that how your judge if an employer is good or bad?
    • WkndTriathlete 4y ago
      Talk to the candidate. If you (and the candidate) cannot communicate well enough in 30 minutes to discover that then either (a) you don't know enough to work well with a really good developer or (b) the developer doesn't know enough to work with you or (c) both are true. I have never been let down by this rule, either as a candidate or an interviewer. In my experience coding exercises as part of an interview process are a big red flag to me indicating the company is trying to compensate for lack of in-house talent with process or they are trying to replace someone with a certain hard-to-find skillset because they have an immediate fire they are trying to put out. Neither situation is a good one to get into.
      • gsibble 4y ago
        Trust me when I say I've talked to plenty of candidates who I thought were great only to learn they couldn't actually code fizzbuzz. Talking to candidates doesn't work.
        • sys_64738 4y ago
          You want programmers to do tricks and silly initiation dances which is your whole problem. If you actually asked real questions about their experience then you’d get a good grounding. I might do silly problems for a high profile employer but that’s likely not you. In which case if I tell you to stop wasting my time and walk out of your attempted initiation ritual then you won’t like it.
          • gsibble 4y ago
            No worries.
            • sys_64738 4y ago
              Your tone speaks dividends about how you view programmers. Often when you ask why something is hard then you’re the problem, not them. Edit: FYI. The OP changed their initial reply from the condescending combative response to that below.
    • NaturalPhallacy 4y ago
      My favorite because of how realistic it is, is have me/the candidate do a code review. It's a real world thing that will be a part of most jobs that doesn't require artificial nonsense like coding in a browser, memorizable hacker rank crap, or some throw away time wasting coding challenge. As for if I can code, I have seven public github repos, 3 of which are previous take home challenges of varying degrees of absurdity.
      • gsibble 4y ago
        I said this elsewhere but reviewing previous projects or doing a code review does help somewhat, but it leaves out my ability to see your actual coding skill re: speed. I need to get a sense of that in order to feel comfortable hiring you. The only way I can do that is if you do some live coding one way or another. How you do it at our company is entirely up to you. With our salaries, we have yet to have anyone turn us down when we get to that stage of the interview, but maybe someday it'll happen.
        • deleted 4y ago
          [deleted]
    • akvadrako 4y ago
      Paid take home assignments are the best in my experience.
      • gsibble 4y ago
        If someone asks for it, we pay for their time. And we offer to get a sense of how they can code however they want. Take home, virtual pair coding, in-officce pair coding or coding exercises, whatever you want. We just need to see you code in a timeboxed way so we can see how you solve problems and see the results to make sure you write readable, maintainable code. Almost everyone picks take home. Like, over 95%. I'm not sure why people here are complaining about it except that the accounts that are were made 2021+ so maybe it's a generational thing.
• yupper32 4y ago
  > Have 1-2 interviews with a take home. > fire those that don't perform up to expectations quickly. This attitude is why I haven't been recruited. I have 10 years at big tech and companies expect me to jump ship with the threat of getting fired if I don't immediately live up to expectations (even if I'm confident that I will, but I'll never know how high your expectations are until it's too late). Add on wild take home assignments on top of my full time job and (typically) less pay than big tech. It's simply not worth the trouble.
  • gsibble 4y ago
    I've never poached someone without giving them a significant raise for one thing. I'm always clear about my expectations which are pretty simple - your time belongs to you. We pay you a high salary and expect you to get your assigned work done. As long as you get it done on time, you can fuck off and enjoy all of the excess time you have. If you do all of your two week sprint work in 20 minutes, you can enjoy the next two weeks off. Most companies pile work upon their best performers. I'm the opposite. I reward our best performers by giving them back their time. Expectations differ some depending upon compensation, but really as long as you get your reasonable expectations done, I'm happy, you're happy, management is happy. It's never been an issue.
    • PenguinCoder 4y ago
      > If you do all of your two week sprint work in 20 minutes, you can enjoy the next two weeks off. Citation/sources wanted. That was my expectation with a 'salary' job; being paid to get the work done. Work is done under 40hr, congrats go home! Work takes longer than 40hr, oh well. In my experience though, in _every single_ company punishes efficiency and hard work, with more work. You're done in 20h? CONGRATS, you get Bob's work now too! Make sure to get his and your work done! Leaving early is absolutely not heard of.
      • gsibble 4y ago
        Yes, I/we do things significantly different than any other company I've worked for. Working fully remote makes it easier since you don't see people getting up from their desks or not coming into work. Our developers have no set hours, can work any hours they want, and are only expected to get the work assigned to them during a sprint done, no more, no less. I brought this style of work to our workplace and it's been a massive success. Everyone is extremely happy and productivity is through the roof. Makes for very loyal and hard working employees. If you read Drive by Daniel Pink, you'll learn that the things that unlock higher performance are Mastery, Autonomy, and Purpose. That's what we strive to give to our employees, including autonomy over their own time and how they get their work done.
• intelVISA 4y ago
  Good approach but can't imagine doing a take home unless it was paid.
  • endtime 4y ago
    I've never been asked to do a take home interview assignment, but I actually have the opposite attitude. I would much rather spend a few hours putting together that I feel good about than spend 10x the time cramming interview prep.
    • andrewingram 4y ago
      I did one that was time limited (2 hours, automatically timed and enforced). The exercise wasn't hard, but it did have some tedious quirks which meant I wasted quite a bit of time. But I thought "fine, I can jump through this 2 hour hoop". After I submitted it, it turned out there were some previously undisclosed extra steps where I had to record videos doing the kind of things i'd expect to do in an actual interview (talk through my solution, and talk about a project I'm proud of). I immediately lost interest.
    • noirbot 4y ago
      Or, you know, you don't cram for the interview and just do as well as you can and let them evaluate on that. If you give me a meaningless take-home assignment, I have to actually write working code for it that looks good. If there's a trivial problem in an in-person interview, I can often "blah blah blah" through the more rote parts unless they really ask for details. There's no wiggle room on a take-home. The code you write either does the thing or it doesn't. If you don't remember the exact way to do something in an in-person interview, you can express your general understanding to the interviewer and probably get some/all the credit of actually knowing it.
      • endtime 4y ago
        > Or, you know, you don't cram for the interview and just do as well as you can and let them evaluate on that. Sure, depends how much you want the job and what your general approach is. If it's a competitive job then you want to optimize for the interviews. Last time I interviewed, the potential impact on my income and net worth over the next decade was significant, so I took it pretty seriously.
• bpicolo 4y ago
  Take homes are one of the single biggest turnoffs for experienced talent in interview processes. People don't want to do them. Especially good devs who can land a job anywhere. > Don't make them jump through hoops The take homes are the hoops.
  • JamesBarney 4y ago
    Maybe a better way to phrase it is, "make the hoops count".
  • gsibble 4y ago
    That's why I try to make take homes fun. I like the elevator problem in Python. Try to make elevator software that passes the unit tests. Sounds simple, right? Wrong. Very hard. I don't really care how successful you are. I want to see how readable and maintainable your code is. Sometimes I just ask for example projects that I can read. But I do need to know you can, you know, actually do the job. I personally find in person coding significantly more stressful than take homes. So what would you suggest? How do I test someone's ability to code?
    • harshalizee 4y ago
      It's not about if the take homes are fun or not. Far too many companies have varied take home tests that can take an hour or a 40-hour work week only to be ghosted after submission. I don't partake in any asymmetric interview processes, and many places are happy to let me skip it. I'm happy to sit on a zoom call with one of your engineers for a couple of hours and do whatever they want me code in that time. I'm just not into doing it on my own time with no cost to the interviewer.
      • gsibble 4y ago
        That's fine. We're happy to let you do that if that's how you'd prefer to show us you can code.
        • ipaddr 4y ago
• jstx1 4y ago
  Everyone else thinks that their way of hiring is the best too.
  • gsibble 4y ago
    Ok, tell me yours.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
• vbezhenar 4y ago
  It's not hard to recruit good developers. It's hard to recruit good developers without paying premium. Pay $1 billion/month and you'll recruit anyone. This is ad absurdum, but you've got idea. If you can pay high, of course it's easy to hire talented developers.
  • gsibble 4y ago
    I don't believe in paying good developers less than they are worth. I'm a CTO. I'm the developers evangelist inside my company. Their success is my success. Their happiness drives my KPIs. I'm not interested in saving a few bucks. I'm interested in getting the best talent I can. I have gone to the mat to fight for people's salary increases and asks many times and won. And it's always paid off (why I don't even have to ask permission for making high offers anymore). Good developers are usually worth significantly more than what they think they are and what they are happy to get paid.
• analyst74 4y ago
  Great advice. We can see the opposite in Amazon where they successfully built a reputation as a terrible place to work with low pay relative to its peers, and now struggle to attract talents.
  • gsibble 4y ago
    I've heard horror stories. No amount of pay could get me to work there.
• JJMcJ 4y ago
  > fire those that don't perform up to expectations quickly What's the compensation for that risk? "We'll fire you in six weeks if you don't work out, so please leave your current job where you're well established and have about a 0.5% chance of getting fired this year." Something like guaranteed six months severance, or a $100K reporting to work bonus with no clawbacks. At the C-level, these kinds of guarantees happen all the time.
  • gsibble 4y ago
    Honestly, we've never encountered this problem. I've never poached someone that didn't work out. Usually, if I poach, I have to pay a premium so I'm fairly sure they can do the job.
    • JJMcJ 4y ago
      That's the hiring side of the issue. What's the assurance for the person you are recruiting?
      • gsibble 4y ago
        We usually hire people unhappy in their current position and make an appealing offer. The chance that switching jobs may not work out is a chance all employees at all companies take. We don't do anything specific to protect against that like 99% of employers.