22 ms·

Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

• donkarma 4y ago
  what company
• water8 4y ago
  Ghosting whether it’s with jobs or women, always means one thing: You were not the top candidate.
  • cowbolt 4y ago
    Clearly, but that doesn't mean it's a nice way to treat people.
• j3th9n 4y ago
  Maybe you can put it on github/write a blog about it and refer to it on your next job interview, they might hire you on the spot instead of sending you home with another assignment.
• perrygeo 4y ago
  Sorry you got ghosted like that - it happens way too often and it sucks. But I think you're using your understandable frustration with this company to dismiss a highly-effective interview technique. Programming is largely solo work punctuated by a high-bandwidth communication (presenting your solution to the team, review, etc.) A take home assignment with a follow up simulates the actual job environment, especially for remote work. No other coding interview technique comes close - portfolio review doesn't show how you worked only that you've worked, in-person coding challenges and whiteboard interviews are so far removed from the daily experience. 2kloc / 6hrs does seem excessive though. My advice to interviewers - keep the exercise time-boxed to 2 hours (And actually have some developers work through it internally to confirm this!) "How far can this candidate get on the problem in 2 hours" is a better signal than "Can they build the perfect solution with unlimited time". And time boxing the assignment gives you lots to talk about - "If you have more time, what would you add or change?" is a prompt that should yield another high-value signal.
• gargs 4y ago
  The thing is that interviewing is hard; it is a full-time job, really, and one that could make or break the company. At the same time, interviewing is not something that current employees are remunerated for, materially or even in terms of time. It is very rare for deadlines to move because half the team is conducting interviews. So, what ends up happening is that nearly everyone in the interviewing process ends up half-arsing it - from the recruiters who prefer to contact nearly everyone eligible based on some keyword searches - to the engineers who have no time to be thorough - to the hiring manager who usually has a bunch of fires to extinguish. A few companies do tend to put quantifiable metrics around their processes but they're usually too reactive and inconsequential. The interviewers have a vested interest in being more productive by hiring the best people, but at the same time, there is personal friction against hiring someone good/better when your own promotion is hanging barely by the 'meets expectations' thread. Now the assignments - they're almost always totally useless. Like, build a new app based on a third party API and then make sure to test it. Useless because of multiple reasons - the API is nothing like what you use at work; your current product team has coalesced around some archaic architecture that no Greenfield app would use; it's the take home assignment of the month (like the favorite 'build a movie app using the OMDb API'). A better alternative would be to open up your own API and perhaps a module of your current production app and add something to it, create a PR, or even just fix a bug or two. I actually think asking candidates to document a module is much more useful than asking them to write code you would never use, even if you pay for such an assignment. Onsite interviews are even more useless - it's usually the most vocal people asking esoteric questions about older technology or algorithms that they've had success with candidates stumbling upon. Again, almost none of the whiteboard exercises or questions are from real-world scenarios. You could pay candidates for the interview process, but that doesn't even address why interviewing is so fundamentally broken. I bet we would have amazing software products if we just interviewed better, especially when companies have been able to lobby for right to work laws nearly everywhere.
• didgetmaster 4y ago
  I once did an interview with a company that wanted me to do a homework assignment. It was obvious from the problem that it wasn't just a way to find out if you could code, but was a real problem the company was facing. I spent a couple hours on it, but I realized that in order to get it working and tested, it would require many more hours of work. I started peppering the code with comments like /* here I would verify the validity of the data by doing X */ to show them I knew what needed to be done without doing all the grunt work. I sent the code, but the manager got back to me and said he expected finished code that actually worked and not just pseudo code. I politely told him that I would gladly do the work if he wanted to pay me my fee I usually charge for contract work. He declined so the company did not get a bunch of free consulting work, which I think was the point of the exercise. Too many companies get away with this.
• davydm 4y ago
  Seeking actual code that you made is totally reasonable for the realm we're in. It's literally what you're being hired for. 1. set up a good GitHub (or other) profile; convince potential employers to look at that rather than test you (I've done this - it can work) 2. if a company still insists you "do the test", then either your GH is too sparse (spruce it up!) or they're full of shit - but you have another data point to work with 3. even the most trivial "toy project" test could be 1 hr for one person and 6hr for another, so what's unreasonable for you may be totally reasonable for the level they're aiming at
• happy_path 4y ago
  I don't mind doing home assignments as long as they're interesting. Make learn about some technology or some design pattern or whatever. Something that improves my skill. If I am going to dedicate some of my own time to a project, at least, push my skills to the limit and "help me" grow. I refuse to do basic projects that make me learn nothing and feel like a wasting of time. Most of the time if the assignment is "not interesting" the future offer would be lower than I expect and the daily job is going to be boring. I think that my point of view is going to be unique here, maybe is because I need a "push" to improve my skills (I'd rather not to be fair), but although I have been rejected from some processes after a long and hard assignment, I have learn something and I'm happy (almost grateful) about that.
• earth_walker 4y ago
  All industries and professions have the same problem - how do you know your new hire is right for you? So you think that a 6 hour unpaid assignment is unfair. What do you think the alternative should be? Many of the posts here point out that 'take-home-tests' aren't common in other professions, but completely miss how many free hours other professionals have to do to prove their suitability for potential employers. Here are some examples: - Designers, photographers and writers spent countless hours putting together and updating portfolios. - Anyone part of a professional association (doctors, nurses, pharmacists, engineers, architects, pilots, etc...) spend many hours studying for and writing exams (for free), and then every other year spend hours documenting all of the professional development they have done to maintain their credentials (also for free). - Many higher responsibility jobs, especially in public institutions and government, require months-long application processes complete with multiple interviews, essay questions, and personality tests. - Consultants can spend 40 hours or more crafting proposals for every new contract they go after. - Academics and researchers require regular publications and often do regular peer reviews for free. I doubt anyone gets a job of any importance based on a resume and a quick coffee unless of course there's nepotism or greek letters involved. So how should programmers prove themselves to a potential employer? Would you rather have a professional association? or standardize on coding portfolios? Or perhaps you want to go back to the days of three essay questions and a personality test?
• dgudkov 4y ago
  We pay for home assignments no matter if we like the result or not. First, it seems fair and it has never been a problem from a financial standpoint. Second, because we pay we can give less trivial and more realistic assignments that can take up to 10-15 hours of work. We look if the candidate uses the time to analyze the problem, ask more deep questions, write tests, annotate the code, and make it production-ready in other ways. So far, this approach worked very well for us.
• potta_coffee 4y ago
  It sucks to do these assignments but I can't whiteboard to save my life. I've gotten my best jobs by wowing the interviewers with my take-home assignment.
• maury91 4y ago
  I had a similar experience, did go through: - initial interview with HR - technical interview with devs - home assignment ( you can find it on my GitHub with the name 2048 ) - discussion of the assignment with the same devs of the technical After every step they said they were very impressed, I did reach the step where they were scheduling the final interview with the CTO then they weren't able to schedule it and they disappeared for months with the excuse of hiring freeze. Apparently they hired someone else and they decided to put me on hold indefinitely
• wilihybrid 4y ago
  Ghosting obviously sucks. But, I challenge the OP to post a link to their code here. Hardly anyone on this planet writes 2Kloc of fresh tested, error-free ("ironed out the edge cases") code in 6 hours. Happy to do a free code review if it's in one of my native languages.
• satisfice 4y ago
  The headline is wrong. You should have said “Unpaid… are not ok for ME.” Maybe someone else is more hungry, more ambitious, more game than you. They deserve their shot. When I have given assignments like this, I said “the result of this work belongs to you. You can show it to any prospective employer. In fact, if you can show me a portfolio of your work, then you do not need to do this assignment.” (I hire testers, and they rarely have examples of their testing work to show off.)
• diek00 4y ago
  A few weeks back I was sent a home assignment by a company and it was a full blown production level program. If someone asked me to do it, I would charge them a minimum of $10,000. And it required I pay for an API, complete testing, caching, Dockerized, and a laundry list of other requirements. And it certainly would take a lot longer than a few hours. The most reasonable company I have dealt with was Trip Ninja, an Amazon gift card for my time. Regrettably I tripped up, and messed up the test, timed tests are my Achilles heel.
• therealdrag0 4y ago
  Homework must be paired with an hour review session with interviewer. Company needs to have skin in the game.
• storoj 4y ago
  > I will not do take home assignments for free if they take more than 1h of my time. How is it possible to do anything meaningful in just an hour?
• willcipriano 4y ago
  I've had the same experience. Submitted a working code test and crickets. I left it up on my GitHub named "{company name} coding test" and a couple of months later they asked me to take it down beacuse other people were plagiarizing it. Like them, I was concerned with the legal ramifications of providing any sort of contact, so I took no action and didn't respond.
  • smcl 4y ago
    That's an excellent response
  • water8 4y ago
    Yeah, they were clearly plagiarizing. You should’ve told them to go pound sand
    • WhompingWindows 4y ago
      Plagiarizing aka Parent Comment just made an Open Source "library". What's wrong with using those??
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      • collyw 4y ago
        If a solution to a problem is available on github it would make sense to use it if it solves the problem.
    • adastra22 4y ago
      I would have sent them a contract to buy the code for $15k.
      • highwaylights 4y ago
        This is the correct answer, assuming you didn’t sign anything that gave them the rights to what you produced.
• water8 4y ago
  Well did you do any research about the company before dedicating six hours of your life? At the end of the day you got more programming experience and avoided a toxic situation. Sounds like a win to me
  • pc86 4y ago
    What a bad take. Are you volunteering your time for free on Upwork so you can "get more programming experience" and avoid a bunch of toxic situations? Of course not.
    • water8 4y ago
      I’m saying when you apply to a random company you’re going to get random results
  • salil999 4y ago
    You don't interview to get "programming experience". You're interviewing to get a job. Definitely not a win.
    • water8 4y ago
      Well apparently he needed it because they felt his coding skills weren’t good enough to hire
      • wccrawford 4y ago
        We don't know that. Perhaps someone else appeared to have more skill.
        • marcinzm 4y ago
          Or they had too many applicants and ignored him randomly, or they had an internal transfer, or they decided they didn't like his resume and never even looked at his code (no cost to have him do the exercise after all...), or they didn't like his style of tabs vs spaces, etc.
• usgroup 4y ago
  That sort of thing happens —- try and be really clear what you expect back if you do an assignment. Put it on an email. Otherwise I’d write to them and tell them that you have an issue. Chase a bit, presumably you don’t know the reason for the ghosting. Having said that they could be ghosting you because they are assholes. There are unfortunately a lot of inconsiderate assholes in tech.
  • water8 4y ago
    There’s also a lot of people that think the world owes them something. Why do they owe you a response? OP agreed to do an assignment did but did they get the company to agree to call them back on a set date? A good job is like a hot girl they don’t have time to text back all the rejects
    • mathverse 4y ago
      Are you serious? It is a common courtesy to at least reply with a generic email.
      • water8 4y ago
        But not everyone is courteous. So instead of writing an emotional post a frustration every time it happens you should just accept human nature and move on without wasting time and dwelling on the past
      • brutusborn 4y ago
        You're both right: noone is 'owed' a response but ghosting is still discourteous.
        • water8 4y ago
          People get frustrated by ghosting because they spend all this time wondering the cause when it’s very simple. They can’t come to the simple truth that they weren’t good enough compared to other options
• nnoitra 4y ago
  6 hours is too little, Google will make you practice algorithms for months and still people will willingly do it.
  • quickthrower2 4y ago
    Google doesn’t require you to do that in any Google-exclusive way. You can take that prep to an Amazon or Facebook interview. If it were a ship building company asking you to do 6 months of ship building business logic to get a job that would be different, for example.
    • nnoitra 4y ago
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0ysH2Glw5w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0ysH2Glw5w
  • jstx1 4y ago
    The thing is that if you practice for Google's interviews, at the same time you're also practicing for any other company that uses the same process (and that's many companies).
• aranw 4y ago
  I've had this before from a big company in the Go space. They constantly still sent me job ads and requested for me to interview and repeatably ghosted me. Wasn't until I direct messaged the CTO on a public Slack community to find out that I had not passed and that was why they wouldn't consider me and why I had been repeatably ghosted. No feedback as to why I failed the test or anything
  • blupbar123 4y ago
    >No feedback as to why I failed the test or anything As a company, you can't really provide feedback on why people failed the test. Hell of a lot of people will get defensive and get into arguments with you that you don't have time for. I agree however that one should at least tell you you are being rejected instead of ghosting you. That's just bad manners.
    • Nextgrid 4y ago
      > Hell of a lot of people will get defensive and get into arguments with you that you don't have time for. I find this to be a bullshit cop-out. You can always ghost them after providing initial feedback if you don't want to engage in arguments.
    • Fire-Dragon-DoL 4y ago
      You can state _facts_ about the source code in a rejection email. It's annoying, you can't say things that would be useful, but there are always facts about source code that can be used for rejection.
    • detaro 4y ago
      You don't have to let them pull you into arguments
• pydry 4y ago
  I have a rule that I refuse to participate in hiring processes that require unequal investment (of time/money) from me and the company. If the hiring process requires 2 minutes of the company's time for every 1 hour of yours they are pretty much guaranteed to waste your time. I've made exceptions to this rule before for what I thought were good reasons and deeply regretted it every single time. I no longer believe there are exceptions.
  • prox 4y ago
    I will do it after they paid me for it. You as an individual are a business as well, somehow people never get that mindset (until burned a couple of times)
• etaioinshrdlu 4y ago
  I have been on both sides of this and I have a rule I try to always follow: I don't ghost people, no matter who. (Unless they are belligerent.) I always send some type of polite response. Even in unpleasant circumstances.
• lr4444lr 4y ago
  I just don't do them at all. It sets bad terms for the employer / employee relationship IMHO. I realize some devs just aren't that in demand yet and may have to subject themselves to this, but you should do your damndest once you get the job to build the skills not to have to stand for it in your next one.
  • AdvancedCarrot 4y ago
    Indeed. I've offered them before to people who were borderline - i.e. in the interview they didn't really shine but I wanted to give them a chance to redeem themselves. Goes either way really.
• jjgreen 4y ago
  For a 2015 ML job I applied for: | We are wondering if you would like to attempt our code challenge (C/C++ or | Python). It is a Computer Vision problem which we think can be solved in | about 8 hours. I'm afraid I wouldn't, 8 hours is far too much for a interview problem. However, thanks for considering my application.
  • yitchelle 4y ago
    Alternatively, you could say..."for my time spent after the 1st hour, I will charge you $200/hour. Are we good to proceed"
    • jjgreen 4y ago
      My take on this what they were testing whether I could be pushed around, and I won't be. I'd not want to work at a place that plays those kind of mind-games.
      • adastra22 4y ago
        You are, of course, correct. You still could have made $XXX/hr for the privilege to continue this charade and then reject their offer.
    • sneak 4y ago
      For someone skilled at doing ML, your hourly contract rate is about 60% too low.
      • yitchelle 4y ago
        There you go, the correction is made. :-)
  • coffeeblack 4y ago
    Alternative response: “Sure, I charge $xxx per hour, payable in advance. Please deposit to account xxxx and you get the solution 24 later.”
• VoodooJuJu 4y ago
  But you confirmed to the company that it is okay, by completing the assignment. That's why companies assign this kind of homework - because you and thousands of others gladly do the work.
• ZiggerZZ 4y ago
  [dead]
• larrymyers 4y ago
  I don't think coding exercises are going away any time soon. There is something to be said to be able to solve a problem without having interviewers staring at you over video, and being able to use your preferred tools and language. That being said, if you want to avoid having a large imbalance in risk/reward, I would suggest talking compensation before agreeing to submit yourself to a large time investment. At least that way you know why you are putting in the time investment that comes with take home assignments. There's nothing worse that putting in a significant effort into the interview process only to discover your compensation expectations would never be met.
• oleg_antonyan 4y ago
  They are much better than livecoding. I take 8 hour home assignment over 1 hour livecode torture.
  • gwd 4y ago
    At least with live-coding, the company is investing at least as many person-hours as you are -- in my experience 2x as much, since there are normally 2 people doing the evaluation.
    • n0tth3dro1ds 4y ago
      Preparation for live-coding, leetcode style interviews takes way longer than any take home. Kids on Blind are doing 200+ leetcode problems before starting their interview loops. How many hours is that? You’re basically just choosing to forget about all the prep needed to ace a DP problem on the spot.
      • sokoloff 4y ago
        I find the leetcode problems fun. I’m not planning to interview for an SWE role until it’s time to “retire”, but I do several leetcode problems a week anyway.
    • oleg_antonyan 4y ago
      It doesn't matter if you are like me, cannot perform at all in such environment: stress, sweaty palms, high heartrate and inability to write anything harder than hello world.
  • collyw 4y ago
    I am 50/50 with this. Livecoding is very hit and miss. If the answer comes into your head under the pressure, all good. If it doesn't you look incompetent. Usually it's 50/50 for me. So 2 hours of effort would likely get me pass. 8 hours of assignment should as well, but I have been rejected for ridiculously trivial reasons on take homes as well.
  • throwaway43345 4y ago
• 101008 4y ago
  I've been in both sides, and what they did to you was horrible. Just last week I had a call with someone who did the take home assigment very badly, but I wanted to give him some feedback and showed him a better solution. Nonetheless, I can't think of a better solution for this. Hiring someone is a big commitment (for both parts), so I want to be completely sure that I am hiring the right person. How do you that? How do you measure the quality of the other person in an area such as IT where it's so easy to lie about knowledge and experience?
  • dcminter 4y ago
    Do pair-programming exercises. When the hiring company is investing a proportionate amount of their time in the process then I'm much more willing to participate. It's much the same vein as that Canonical recruitment questionnaire that was doing the rounds a while ago - if you want to sit with me (virtually or IRL) and ask me questions, that's fine. If you want me to submit an essay that takes me hours to write then you're going to have to be offering me something I cannot possibly get elsewhere! In the end it's about mutual respect.
    • 101008 4y ago
      The problem is that the pair programming exercises are not proof of a real work enviroment. Some of the problems or challenges at work won't get an answer in 2 o 3 minutes, sometimes you need to think more of them (in work, maybe one or two days, in the excercise, maybe 30 minutes). Secondly, some candidates get very nervous/anxious when they have to answer code in an interview and can't show they real knowledge, etc. Pair programming hasn't worked for me because you get a lot of false negatives that are hard to distinguish from the real false.
      • dcminter 4y ago
        To your first point - sure, but if you're not willing to invest the one-or-two-days in the exercise why should the candidate? If you're offering a top-tier salary, or something so technically exciting that it can't be resisted, then sure, you get to set the bar as high as they'll jump. Otherwise "Are we willing to invest this much" is a good rule of thumb for what you can reasonably expect of the candidate. To your second point - any hiring exercise is going to be stressful for the candidate. False negatives are better than false positives (for the hiring party). If you're certain that this is going to cost you too many good candidates, then you're going to have to find some other way to demonstrate good faith up front - offer to pay them, offer to host them on your premises, something like that.
• androa 4y ago
  I do a lot of interviews for my company. We do coding assignments OR let you bring some code. We just want to talk with you about code that you are very familiar with and confident to talk about. Almost everyone chooses to do the small coding assignment, because they don't have code to bring.
  • androa 4y ago
    If you get to talking about code (usually after a quick seeding of applications and a 30 minute chat), we will always talk about the code and also give feedback on our impression. So even if you don't make the cut, we hope to provide valuable feedback on why.
  • rajasimon 4y ago
    For personal project there will not be a TDD so coder not willing to share their existing codes. I rather showcase my skills in a new development than say already done one.
    • androa 4y ago
      Yeah, in our case the point isn't really the code, but how you reason around it. How able are you to explain the flow of the code. And also reason about choices made. There is a real treasure trove of things to talk about. Questions like: - Why is it like Y? - What is good and bad about Y? - Why do you think X would be better? - Why did you end up doing Y instead of X? - How would you approach changing it to X? Discussions like these on both a macro and micro level is very valuable.
    • Kaze404 4y ago
      The company I work for now has a similar approach. I showed a personal project and eventually got an offer. It's not even a particularly great one, as I had not worked on it in a couple years.
      • rajasimon 4y ago
        Me too! I shared my live projects to them. Also I have couple of OSS project that are doing good in my domain so I got a job.
• _iyhy 4y ago
  Totally agree they are worse than DS&Algo(For those who consider them).
• lbriner 4y ago
  It's only fair that a company asking you to do this should pay you because they should only be doing it once they are far down the funnel and perhaps deciding whether you are go/no-go in which case, paying somebody a few hundred dollars is neither here or there. If you are doing it because you don't believe someone's ability, you should either pay them or be honest and say you don't believe their experience, in which case it is up to you whether you want to do it for free or not. I find the ghosting unforgiveable though, I can't understand somebody being in contact and you simply not replying even if to say "sorry, we aren't taking you". Are people so insecure, they don't know how to reply without sounding aggressive/opening themselves up to lawsuits or something?
  • have_faith 4y ago
    > It's only fair that a company asking you to do this should pay you I don't think it's a question of fairness at all. It's certainly inconvenient and the longer the test the more likely I am to dismiss it off hand but a couple hours is ok, more than that needs good justification. If a company is offering me a salary thats 90th percentile or above then I don't see the problem with having to jump through some (reasonable) hoops. The ghosting part is unquestionably rude though and any such company should be named and shamed so that people can avoid them if they want.
• jstx1 4y ago
  > I will not do take home assignments for free if they take more than 1h of my time. Even then, if something can be done in 1 hour, it can probably be done better in 2-3 hours or more. It takes time to show your best work. That's why many companies that do take-homes claim that their process takes only a couple of hours (but in reality it doesn't).
• hprotagonist 4y ago
  In the event that I’m responsible for assigning these sorts of things, my rough metric is to come up with a task that I, fully spun up on the task and already thinking about it, would be able to do in about 30 minutes. I then time myself doing it. I figure that means the applicant time commitment is under 2 hours, which seems not too bad.
• Nextgrid 4y ago
  You can always publish the assignment on your GitHub and use it for future roles, explaining that you won't be doing any future assignments but they are welcome to look at the previous one.
• datalopers 4y ago
  It’s odd to me how people complain so much about being asked to write code (whiteboard, take-home, leetcode puzzles) in order to land a coding job. Is a prospective employer supposed to suss this out entirely through verbal questions?
  • Tryk 4y ago
    I think the issue is more to do with the unpaid aspect rather than the take-home.
  • mathverse 4y ago
    It's odd to me that you have completely misunderstood what is the problem here. It's not the take home assignment that is the problem but the asymmetric relationship and toxic practices. I invest 6h of my time as a highly paid engineer to do a home assignment and at best I receive a reply "sorry we found a candidate that's a better fit?". That's what's unacceptable.
    • datalopers 4y ago
      Have you considered that it took you 6hr and 2k loc is maybe precisely why they didn’t hire you and it, in fact, was a very successful candidate screening tool?
      • mathverse 4y ago
        It has nothing to do with that. The numbers here are to illustrate the effort needed to solve the home assignment.
  • vitno 4y ago
    I don't think people are complaining about writing code, I think they are complaining about the time involved with take homes (just having done a couple I can empathize with) and whiteboard codings "high stress nature". I've also had interviews which just talk about work I've done before. Most industries only need that, and I'm coming around to those being the more valuable questions.
  • 4y ago
• pc86 4y ago
  Up front, ghosting is not okay in general. But, a few counterpoints: It seems very unlikely they expected or wanted it to take you 6 hours. Possible, but certainly an outlier (and obviously bad actor) if so. If they expected you to spent 1.5-2 hours on it - a reasonable amount of time IMO - but when got it back you clearly spent an entire day working on it, that's enough to fail because you didn't follow the directions. Additionally, software development seems to be the only area where the candidates get bent out of shape being expected to prove they know what they're doing. Take home tests are bad and have to be confined to an hour. Whiteboard interviews are bad and don't accurately model the day-to-day. Leetcode is bad because it's 10x harder than anything you'll work on. How exactly do we expect someone to get a sense of our skill at programming if we eschew every opportunity to... program for them to review? The exception might be extremely well-known people who have extensive public histories on GitHub or something similar, but by definition they're in the minority and 99.9% of companies don't need someone of that caliber. I interviewed with a health tech startup and they had a good way to do it. We set up a time ahead of time when I'd be given access to the repo. 90 minutes later the interviewer was going to clone the repo and whatever was there was what he was going to look at. This was after a previous ~hour long interview where we did the "tell me about your experience" rigamarole that some developers seem to think should be enough to get them any job.
  • xtiansimon 4y ago
    > “…software development seems to be the only area where the candidates get bent out of shape being expected to prove they know what they're doing.” FYI—Graphic Designers have been “bent out of shape” over spec work in hiring for ages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculative_work https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculative_work
    • pc86 4y ago
      LeetCode is not spec work.
  • bogwog 4y ago
    Those aren't "counterpoints", they're assumptions.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• quickthrower2 4y ago
  I am not too sure getting paid for them honestly makes much difference. For an average job hunt the amount you would be paid is small compared to the hopeful raise you get. Plus tax complications. Before doing an assignment just work out the “pot odds” and see if you want to raise or fold. Yes it is basically poker!
• iambateman 4y ago
  To me, there are three tests to figure out if a home assignment is reasonable… 1. Is it actually giving the employer more confidence or information about your candidacy? 2. Is it within the normal bounds of an interview? If someone asked you to do another 60 minute technical interview, would you? 3. Is the company clearly not trying to use the product of your code challenge? To be honest, there are a lot of people who can look impressive but turn out to be totally under-skilled at coding. I’m sympathetic to hiring managers who feel like they need to test for that. As long as it’s not a super long exercise, they’re not just hazing you, and they’re not trying to use the results, I think it’s fine.
  • Verdex 4y ago
    Yeah, I think this is reasonable. I had a pre-technical interview "take home" coding challenge, which was just: Reverse a string in whatever programming language you like best. The technical interview itself drilled down more deeply into my skill level, however I can appreciate that they wanted to have a bare minimum idea that I could actually program before committing more time. The favor was more than returned when they took me out to lunch in the middle of the technical interview and let me ask as many questions as I liked about the company.
• badpun 4y ago
  I prefer them to whiteboarding. Preparing for whiteboard interviews takes a lot more time. I will however not accept a take-home coding test before I spoke with the engineering team and saw that they're seriously considering my application (i.e. it looks like I will be a good fit, and they just want to make sure I'm not some fraud who can somehow talk the talk, but can't walk the walk).
• kadirmalak 4y ago
  Home assignments are a great way to evaluate a candidate. A "one hour" project would not be sufficient for that, the problem would be too easy. I find it weird that you guys don't want to spend some time to show your skills to the employer, without getting paid. These are not real projects. You're not benefiting the employer when you finish them. They also spend some time evaluating your project submission. (I'm not talking about the companies trying to make people work free by giving them parts of the real projects in disguise)
  • lkschubert8 4y ago
    Its hugely asymmetrical in terms of amount of time spent in a setting where there is already a large amount of asymmetry.
  • rrwo 4y ago
    It's literally gambling with your time. You do the work, with the hope of winning a job. That's several hours of your time that could be used for things that will have a more immediate benefit: working your current day job, working on open source projects, or maybe on some other hobbies or even spending time with your family. Or even sleeping.
  • flaviut 4y ago
    > They also spend some time evaluating your project submission. I could evaluate a project in 5-10 minutes. Or an employer could have a fully automated system for the first round of evaluation. The problem isn't benefiting the employer, it's that the costs are asymmetrical. The employer has no incentive to act in a way that respects the applicant's time. There's a similar problem in real estate. If buyers weren't required to place a deposit with their offers, they'd waste the time of countless sellers.
• blackoil 4y ago
  First, Ghosting is a shit move. No reason HR can't send a standard lawyer approved boiler plate rejection mail. 2nd aspect is unpaid take homes. It's complicated. Companies do pay a lot to fly candidates, put them in hotels and feed them for onsite interview. So financially company can afford to pay something. But it adds a moral hazard as you are paying cash irrespective of any expected quality or commitment. Other thing I would like to highlight is that unlike any other industry, tech. allows people to enter at ease irrespective of the pedigree and credentials. No hospital would hire a physician who has read a lot on the Internet and did some pro-bono help to the neighbourhood kids. So what is the best way to hire isn't very well defined. It could be Leetcode, puzzle problems, take home tests or something else.
  • Ancalagon 4y ago
    I haven't had an in-person onsite in the ~20 onsites I went to for my last job hunt. I think they're going the way of the dinosaur for technical interviews.
  • PaywallBuster 4y ago
    > Companies do pay a lot to fly candidates, put them in hotels and feed them for onsite interview. I tend to see 1) quick phone call with recruiter 2) please make assignment in Europe at least
    • collyw 4y ago
      That's a red flag to me.I want to at least speak with someone on the tech team before I agree to do a few hours of work for free.
      • ThePadawan 4y ago
        Yeah, over here, companies don't understand why anyone would want that. Surely the generic job description with 10 bullet points has answered all your questions, or you wouldn't have applied (/s)? Then they go on to complain that candidates will jump off and that they can't find enough employees.
• rrwo 4y ago
  I have 25+ years of open source software and contributions. If that isn't enough to convince them that I know how to design and write software, then homework won't be enough.
• treyfitty 4y ago
  An unintended consequence of these coding assignments is that it creates a pervasive labor market that optimizes for finding candidates that already know things. Historically, joining the labor force, and a company, required training. Letting this behavior continue permeates the expectation that corporations can shirk on their duty to train and build employees. Instead, they have the luxury of finding cogs ready to go, out of the box. I think we need to stand up and advocate for the expectation that corporations should provide more value to society than just print money. They should be held accountable to creating a strong, and healthy labor force.
• pgm8705 4y ago
  6 hours of work is too much and ghosting is never acceptable, but I'd much rather do a take home assignment that takes a few hours than any sort of in person whiteboard or a screen share coding session. I struggle with where the line is drawn here. If throughout the interview process you spend over an hour talking to various individuals at the company should you also be compensated for that time? That being said, I've seen cases where the take home assignment is actual company work, in which case I 100% agree you should be paid.
• social_quotient 4y ago
  Isn’t the root of this need to make developers code stuff to prove their skills because we don’t have an accredited body giving people meaningful certification? A dr would not do a quick surgery and a power plant engineer won’t build “just a quick test reactor” because they have credentials and the hiring bodies trust those creds. In software is the problem that we don’t trust what the resume implies? Where does the deep distrust come from? Why don’t we have an equivalent to a medical, legal, or engineering accreditation? (I’ll state the obvious ghosting was wrong)
  • trinovantes 4y ago
    Historically, professional accreditation came from the need to protect the general public from harm. Random people can't use "doctor" or "engineer" in their job titles because the consequences of incompetence means loss of life. For most software development jobs, the worst outcome is probably user inconvenience.
  • kuratkull 4y ago
    Having the candidate actually write something and describe their thought process shows very quickly what their level is. Also most candidates fail the test. It's liken hiring an artist without looking at their work - anyone can claim to be one, but is their work the kind you need.
  • indigochill 4y ago
    It goes beyond upfront accreditation. Doctors and lawyers get accredited credentials, sure, but more importantly they're also subject to strict regulations around malpractice. You can BS your way through most degree programs, but you can't BS your way through a law or medical practice because sooner or later you'll wind up doing something illegal and be stripped of the right to practice. In software, it would not be enough just to require a degree. We'd have to also have some auditing entity that ensured the software written in practice conformed with the standards of professional engineering. And as the industry stands today, that applies to 0% of software created in a professional setting, never mind that very few corporations would be cool with auditors poking around in their code, at least without strict NDAs. Not that I'm arguing that we should go this way. I for one embrace the wild west era of software for as long as it lasts. But if we were to give accreditation any weight, it would have to come accompanied with a standardized method to verify the accreditation is actually meaningful.
• ekianjo 4y ago
  Thats up to you. For technical jobs its much easier to judge a candidate with home assignments than just bullshit trick questions in interviews.
• jerf 4y ago
  According to the HN gestalt, you shouldn't do a whiteboard interview because that's too unrealistic because nobody programs on a whiteboard, you shouldn't expect programmers to code with their laptop in an interview because that's too much pressure and also unrealistic, you shouldn't expect programmers to be willing to do a take home exam because that's too much work without money (and if people did pay, the complaint would smoothly shift to it not being enough money and still being too much work), and you shouldn't just hire people with the intention of rapidly firing them if they don't work out because that's cruel to uproot them like that if you're just going to fire them. Recruiters are also out because they suck and also drain money out of the transaction for no gain since they bring no value to the process. Apparently the approved HN method is to arrange the resumes on a dartboard, throw darts at it, and commit up front to hiring whoever you hit unconditionally for at least two years without no possibility of having to fire them. Or something like that. Setting limits on what you will do is good, and ghosting is bad, certainly. But in the end, you're going to have to do something unfun to get hired. There's no way around it. I know we'd all love to live in a world where Google one day just logs on to LinkedIn and is so impressed by the sheer brilliance of our awesomeness which just somehow oozes through our listing despite the fact we didn't have to do anything to demonstrate it, as it's also unrealistic to expect programmers to have a lot of publicly-available demonstrations of their skill such as open source projects (forgot to mention that one!), that instead of hitting you with a job interview they just lead with a job offer for their best position, but that's just not going to happen.
  • ipaddr 4y ago
    Or hire in the same way other positions in the company are: through an interview..
  • jjav 4y ago
    > Apparently the approved HN method Not that there's an approved method, but the best one IMO (and which I've been using succesfully for 25+ years) is to carefully read the person's resume and have an in-depth conversation about projects they have worked on. No trick questions, no whiteboard memorizations, just a normal conversation about the work they claim in their resume they have done.
  • 4y ago
• etothepii 4y ago
  I'm not sure that an 10 x 8 hour job interviews every 2-5 years when you want to leave your old company and get a new one is particularly onerous. My wife is a lawyer, she had to spend 2 years (in the US it's like 4 years at $80k+) and another 40 hours a year for life to maintain the qualifications that allow her to skip the equivalent of coding interviews. I'd rather live in the world of none credentialed programmers to be honest.
• walthamstow 4y ago
  Counterpoint: as a self-taught SWE with only a degree in economics, I wouldn't have been able to get my first job in the industry without a take-home assignment. It was the only possible way to demonstrate that I was qualified to take the job.
  • ThePadawan 4y ago
    What about "Here's 3 classes from our codebase [obviously redacted], can you tell us what they do and why, and any changes you would make?" I have prepared scenarios like this for applications (with some intentional bugs ranging from off-by-one-errors to big architectural fuck-ups) and I think it overlaps a lot with what a candidate would have to do in a take-home assignment anyway.
  • koinedad 4y ago
    This was me as well, albeit the company asked me to time box the take home test to 1 hour, which I think is fairly reasonable.
• danpalmer 4y ago
  Unpaid home assignments are fine, if: - The work produced is not used in any way by the company other than to assess the candidate. - The project has a time limit to prevent those with more time to dedicate to it being able to do better (reduces bias). - The company puts time into reviewing the code that is commensurate with the time spent on it (a 3 hour test warrants at least 45 mins of thorough code review and feedback writing across a couple of engineers). - The company provides options to take the test at a convenient time, or even on-site but unsupervised if desired by the candidate. Asking for payment to take part in an interview isn't a great approach assuming the above are true (which they are often not). Companies don't pay for interviews as general rule, but conversely should be clear about the full time commitment so that candidates can make informed decisions about taking part.
• mechanical_bear 4y ago
  I refuse to do take homes. You don’t ask doctors to treat patients before hiring them. You don’t have a carpenter build a house before you hire them. Insert mechanic, architect, author, etc.. Why should we be any different?
• streetcat1 4y ago
  So can you post the company name?
• johnny_canuck 4y ago
  Ghosting really sucks. I don't understand the practice. Maybe someone here can fill me in on why it is considered OK from the recruiter perspective. Too many folks asking for feedback post-rejection? If that is the case - automate the message with a generic rejection.
  • cal85 4y ago
    Ghosting is not a practice, it’s inaction. And no one really considers it OK. But passive, default behaviours don’t need to be considered OK to keep happening.
• matthewmacleod 4y ago
  I’d be annoyed about being ghosted too, but my takeaway from all the chat about recruitment is that there is no single process which is clearly and significantly better than all the others and they all suck in some way. “Home assignments” suck because they can be unbounded and tend to disadvantage people who might not have a lot of time. “Pair on a feature/bug” sucks because it’s quite hard to many people to demonstrate their skills in that stressful environment with someone they don’t know. “Whiteboard Code Golf” sucks because it hands an advantage to people people who have the time and energy to grind shit they won’t use in their roles. “Paid trials” suck because they’re not something that everyone can contractually participate in. I honestly don’t know what the best approach is, from either side. I have stuck with a single take-home for devs on the basis that we can establish a clear rubric for evaluating them and try to be at least somewhat objective with what we are looking for. Maybe a better approach would be to let the candidate guide it a bit, and offer a selection of different evaluations that they can participate in? At least I agree it’s important to maintain a clear line of communication and respond to everyone. I know it’s easy to let people fall through the cracks as you scale; I hope I’ve never done it myself but I can definitely advise that a robust ATS helps to make sure every application is tracked.
• kasey_junk 4y ago
  You encountered 2 problems and neither of them was the take home assignment. The first is that the company ghosted you. That is unacceptable regardless of what your hiring filter is. You’d be just as aggravated if they’d brought you in for 6 hours of interviews and then ghosted you. The second is they didn’t set expectations (or at least you didn’t tell us if they did). Should you have spent 6 hours on this? How long does it normally take? After the assignment would you be brought in for 6 more hours of interviews or is the assignment the major filter? At the end of the day, take home assignments are the best filter, the most equitable and the most efficient way to do hiring consideration. Companies (usually the middle managers within them) just don’t have the courage to use them correctly and don’t spend the resources to make them a good filter (they also don’t spend resources on the other job filters so those aren’t good either).
• JadoJodo 4y ago
  The tactic I’ve employed at my company when vetting a candidate is to give them a link to a small code sample (usually a single class or service for backend, some JS/CSS for front end) to review the day before the interview. The code itself will include some obvious issues, some less obvious issues, some language specific opportunities for improvement, etc. We then walk through their notes (if they made any), and the code sample itself together. I have them make any observations, critiques, suggestions, or other thoughts together with me. This gives me an idea of how they think, what issues they saw, how they would improve things, how familiar they are with the specific language, and coding in general. It also gives an opportunity for some light “conflict” resolution , if I push back on their thoughts. This has worked really well. Those that don’t do well on the spot can make notes ahead of time (but aren’t expected to spend time coding for hours) and those that are confident can walk through it live.
  • rubylark 4y ago
    I really like this strategy. After one god awful experience at a company that led me to quitting after 3 months, I will not work for a company that doesn't show me a snippet of their own code. The whole experience at that terrible job could have been avoided if I could see their coding practices: early returns, gotos everywhere in C++, 7(!) different languages that compile into one >1GB executable over the course of an hour. They only did white boarding questions which told them a lot about me, but told me nothing about them. I've had 4ish interviews since that job, and all of them gave an on-the-spot code reading assignment to walk through their code to find the bugs. It let me see who has old style coding standards, who takes advantage of modern C++ utilities, and that the interviewers are competent enough to walk through coding examples, too.
  • lenocinor 4y ago
    I’ve used a similar interview technique at a previous job and it was great. The candidates and I both generally liked it a lot.
  • rapht 4y ago
    This resembles to what we do in a very different field (finance) at my organisation for positions with less than 10 years of experience-- only the prep is time limited, at our offices,
• birracerveza 4y ago
  Absolutely. The worst thing is they start small and assign to you increasingly complex tasks the more you progress, with wild excuses to justify it. The sunk cost fallacy is real. Happened to me once. The best thing is I explicitly told them beforehand I had little time to spare for home assignments. I got rejected after almost a week worth of work total. I should have billed them...
• collyw 4y ago
  The best interview experience that I had, the interviewer asked me to bring in a laptop with some of my code. I did, we went through it talked about it, he asked me to add a simple feature, I did. Code I was familiar with (like in a day job). No gotchas. Symmetrical effort from both interviewer and candidate. Worked well for me at least.
• wanderingmind 4y ago
  Just open source the code in github. If you did not sign an NDA, add the data to the repo and send a pull request to a awesomedata repository in github. To add a cherry on the cake, write a blogpost in medium and promote it through LinkedIn and Twitter.
• bjarneh 4y ago
  I've never been asked to hand in any home assignment for a job interview, but I have been asked to do some "live coding" while their employees sat and watched; that was somewhat unpleasant as well. But I guess it beats a huge (unpaid) home assignment. Home assignments should be short and sweet, it does not take a huge complicated task to see who can and cannot write programs. There are differences in ability of course even among "good" programmers, but the main difference is between those who truly cannot do anything, and those who can.
• lbreakjai 4y ago
  We let the candidates decide: Take-home assignment, pair-programming, or we go through an existing project of theirs, discuss it, and extend it together. The take-home assignment is short. It shouldn't take more than an hour if you really really want it to be polished, which we heavily insist we do not care about. The overall process is a bit longer, because we then discuss it together. For the pair programming session, the exercise is picked by a developer that isn't involved in the process, to put candidates and interviewers on equal footing. Our goal is to be able to give an offer within 48 hours starting at the first contact, and give a feedback, positive or negative, maximum one hour after each stage. It's a candidates' market. A long and complicated process only ensures you weed out the candidates who have plenty of options. I'd almost be tempted to give a long assignment and consider everything but a firm "Not even in your dreams" as a failure.
  • VoodooJuJu 4y ago
    >Take-home assignment That's fine, pay me. >pair-programming Again, that's fine, pay me. >go through an existing project of theirs, discuss it, and extend it together The SaaS's I own and operate are closed-source and I'm not looking to take on any contractors at this time, but I'll let you know if anything opens up.
    • ProjectArcturis 4y ago
      Think about the systemic problems that would arise if it were customary to pay applicants for the interview. You'd immediately have application farms spamming out fake resumes. They'd bomb the actual interview but collect $100+ each time.
      • Tryk 4y ago
        It's unduly burdensome to require the candidate to complete a take-home assignment before even having a interview. Simply first interview the candidate (requires an roughly equal investment in time) and then give take-home for the promising candidates. To compensate for the candidates time you obviously should compensate them. To do otherwise is to create a heavily unbalanced situation for the candidate who might have to complete multiple of these take-home assignments (as you're interviewing multiple candidates they should be interviewing multiple companies).
• cal85 4y ago
  The ghosting is what’s not OK. Ghosting a candidate after receiving unpaid take-home interview work from them is doubly bad, that makes them grifters in my book. Tell us who it was so we can avoid them. There’s nothing inherently wrong with unpaid take-home interview work. Don’t do it if you don’t want to do it, but don’t declare that it’s “not OK” in a general sense, as if it’s somehow immoral. If both sides are clear on the arrangement, and it ends with either acceptance or rejection with feedback, there is nothing wrong with it. It’s my favourite format as an interviewee.
• SloopJon 4y ago
  I applied for a QA position at a company that uses time-of-flight cameras with industrial robots. I researched their solution, got a sense for its architecture, and started toying around with building a Flatland-style version of their product. I figured that a demo like that would stand out much better than anything on my resume. They rejected my application before I got too far with the demo, which would have taken me a lot more than six hours to finish. Although it might have been an interesting addition to my Github repo, it was kind of tailored to this one company. I'm not disagreeing with the OP, because I probably wouldn't find an interview project nearly as fun. I wonder, though, whether anyone has been successful with a one-off, company-specific project like this, as opposed to a general portfolio of projects that you've made over the years.
• preommr 4y ago
  > It took me about 6h to develop and iron out the edge cases. This is where you messed up. Set a hard limit of 1-2 hours, and mention edge cases in your comments and move on. It also depends on the stage of the interview. If you're in the early stages then they probably just want to see that you know what you're doing, and it should be fairly fast with the right frameworks, scaffolding, starters, etc.
  • rr888 4y ago
    Yeah I haven't done this enough to be confident to stop after an hour. Usually there is a lot of experimenting with different designs, adding tests, refactoring, tidying up - I'd think a day for a "1 hour" exercise is normal.
• ManVanderHuge 4y ago
  I actually like take homes as they feel like the best way for me to demonstrate I can code vs a Leetcode question which determines I have grinded or am amazing at mental pretzel puzzles. What I DO HATE about take homes, is if you complete one, clearly put time into it, and then are refused feedback when you are rejected. If I put 2-10 hours into writing something for you, I at least deserve three sentences on why it wasn't accepted. I know these people are busy, but so am I. Most of us also have jobs, and even if we don't we want to know how to improve.
• adriancr 4y ago
  I love them, fun challenge, get to experiment with something new. (either by my choice or by requirements) You also get an idea of what company cares about and if its a good match for you. If you move to next step you did something right, if not then there are others that have done better. Ghosting might be a problem like someone forgetting to process stuff, vacations, etc, just check with recruiter whats the status, dont be antisocial. And if it took you 6 hours to do, you chose to do it, and hopefully you learned something. There is no implied obligation on other side to pursue you just because you took on challenge.
• im_dario 4y ago
  I did a home assignment that required far more than 6h. The feedback was atrocious, as they just said "not fit". Not a single comment on what they disliked or how could I improve. Actually, the assignment was "take this shitty service and make it production-ready". It had some pitfalls that I avoided, and I introduced monitoring, automated deployment, API documentation, etc. There was a bug - a minor misunderstanding that was simple to fix if they gave the feedback and allowed to do a quick fix - but the rest was production-ready. I had fun doing it, that's why I didn't mind taking time. What I didn't expect was the poor binary feedback with zero content. From now on, I'm only taking these assignments if they agree to have a feedback session. If not, I won't do anything. I'm close to 20 years of experience and it feels like they treat me like an undergrad (although I have a full Github profile).
  • antisthenes 4y ago
    Making something production-ready is not a take-home assignment, certainly not part of an interview process. Full stop.
    • im_dario 4y ago
      In the context it meant "it should work, it can be deployed in a simple way, and it can be observed at runtime". It was just fixing the buggy implementation, write down a Makefile with everything I thought useful (linting, security scanning, Docker image generation, etc), and integrating with Datadog and Rollbar's SDKs.
  • the_only_law 4y ago
    I had one that was actually simple, took me a trivial amount of time. Then I got grilled in the interview for not pulling in all sorts of bloat and other bullshit for a single endpoint CRUD app.
• maeln 4y ago
  I still think that home assignments can be a good recruiting tool when you are trying to recruit junior, since they can have a very different skill range. For senior it really seems unnecessary. In both case, if you are going to do home assignment, my question to you is: How good is your offer ? I refused several HA when interviewing with companies because their offers was just not good enough for me to take several hours, on top of the regular interview, to do it. If you do HA, make sure your candidate have a reason to want to take several hours for you.
• vinay_ys 4y ago
  You get a lot of signals with the approach described below that are highly indicative of how the candidate is going to perform on the job. With a take-home assignment, you get no signals that can predict their on the job performance. ----- For engineering roles where the person is expected to write copious amounts of code to ship functional features everyday, a 2.5-hour machine coding round to assess coding competency (as part of an interview loop that also has other rounds for problem-solving, data-structures/algorithms, high-level systems design and low-level design) is standard in multiple companies I have seen (and advocated for). While coding round is a strong filter, it is important to assess the interaction of the candidate in these other rounds that are non-coding but designing/problem-solving rounds, especially in high functional domain complexity industry like e-commerce or payments etc. In the machine coding round, the candidate should be given a well-defined written problem statement (from an internal question bank of well-calibrated problem statements) along with test inputs and a few test outputs, and in the first 5 minutes ask them to read the problem and ask any clarifying questions. Then leave them be with a dev machine for next hour. If they choose to, 10 minutes in, they can discuss the approach they are going to take with you. Then after an hour, you can discuss if they have a working code that passes the test inputs. If yes, you can give them an enhancement/modification to make. and leave them be for another 45 minutes. Then, take the last 30 minutes to discuss the solution they have come up with and understand their thinking style w.r.t coding conventions, style etc. If they couldn't complete the enhancement, discuss a potential solution (give a hint) with them and see if they can tackle it. Write calibrated/standardized evaluation notes for your interaction so that others (hiring panel) can understand and decide. Existing engineers inside the company should have tried the problem statements themselves and calibrated to see if the problem is meaningfully solvable in the allotted time.
• hellisothers 4y ago
  I on the other hand would love, LOVE, a take home, I ask for them every time and companies won’t offer them. I don’t excel under the pressure of a 1hr interview and at the staff+ level they expect you to display all sorts of architectural skills that I fin much easier to display not under pressure and not in under 1hr. I wish somebody would compile a list of companies that offer take home even!
• bilsbie 4y ago
  I wonder if you’d have a small claims court case? It seems like it was implied that you were a serious candidate if they asked you to do this. And the implied understanding is that they would at least review your work and provide feedback. Send them an invoice!
• sf_rob 4y ago
  I'd be okay with "homework" if either 1) it's truly time bounded via programmatic cutoffs or 2) it's paid. For time bounding, I love the time estimates they give you for a decent sized problem. A major company told me that a feature extraction problem + report should only take 4 hours. They provided me with some large CSVs representing DB tables (which contained some malformed data) and wanted a brief report back. That's unrealistic in 4 hours even for a great performer. Then you spend the weekend on it and they won't give you feedback on it because of the suits in legal. It's disrespectful.
  • dudul 4y ago
    That's interesting because as a hiring manager I get a lot of push back on our take-home since it does cut you off after a certain amount of time. Our take home shouldn't take more than 90/120minutes, we give candidates up to 4 hours just because some really like to polish, but then that's it. I don't want them to spend more of their spare time on that. The feedback is usually "well, but I want to make sure I can take all the time I need!".
    • sf_rob 4y ago
      I think that’s fair psychologically, but as long as I’m on a level playing field I’d rather have a reasonable upper bound or I’m going to feel forced to overly polish to stand out.
• WrtCdEvrydy 4y ago
  I have found a large drop-off in time wasters after using Starblazer for my scheduling. Not to shill or anything, these recruiters are getting paid 10% to do jack-shit for you so I just send them my scheduling link with my hourly rate... you wanna talk to me? pay me (https://bk.starblazer.pro/Lazaro https://bk.starblazer.pro/Lazaro)
• drabadur 4y ago
  For Japanese companies, it seems to be common to ask candidates to complete coding assignments before any interview. These assignments are usually extremely complex, and would take maybe 2-3 days to complete, depending on the candidates experience. Combine this with relatively low salaries even for experienced developers, I don't think it is something anyone should want to do, no matter how much you'd love to go there.
• dekken_ 4y ago
  lessons learned the hard way
• gabereiser 4y ago
  Next time demand compensation for your time.
• activitypea 4y ago
  Why draw the line at 1 hour? If companies want good talent, they should invest in their interview process, such that take homes are unnecessary. The only companies that asked me to do a take home are ones with horrible, unprepared interviews where it was clear interviewers were just kinda talking and feeling around for... something.
• O__________O 4y ago
  Compared to odd requirements like paying to go to universities for 4+ years, take home assignments are nothing; both are insane waste of time, unless you’re learning something of value that will be of use regardless of the outcome.
• hyperman1 4y ago
  Long ago, I had a candidate in an interview for a short term project. The person had an important hole in his knowledge, but seemed OK apart from that. I was afraid learning the knowledge required to fill the hole would take too much time from the short term project. So I decided to mail a take home assignment. I took about an hour myself to prepare it, the assignment was not work related, it was a completely fictional task. I think it was creating a HTML page of ~50 lines demonstrating the hole could be filled if the person had access to internet and all relevant docs. The person delivered the next work day, did well, and we hired. I've thought long and hard about this, and decided the assignment was a mistake and I would not do it again (sorry to the person in question). Why? In practice, when listening an hour to a candidate and let them write a minimum of code, you know if you have a complete weirdo who never touched a computer, or someone who is at least basically OK. In this case, it was a short term job, so the blast radius was pretty small even if candidate was bad. For longer term engagements, there is generally a test period and better vetting available. Meanwhile, I was in a position of power over someone else, and while the whole thing seemed minor to me at the time, I later heard the (junior) candidate was worried sick and spent way to much time on the assignment. An underlying cause for my mistake was the interview situation, which was very bad. Basically, I was in the middle of something else, and a project lead I had never heard of for a project I had never head of asked me to do a technical interview while the candidate I had never heard of was already sitting in a meeting room. Needless to say, I was completely unprepared. There wasn't even a whiteboard in the meeting room. So I basically adjusted by always being prepared for surprise candidates: A list of questions for most common technologies and a template for technically grading candidates were always stashed away in my locker from then on, and the people starting projects would keep us interviewers in the loop when a job would open.
• latortuga 4y ago
  Our position on this has always been that if a candidate finishes our sample coding task, they are automatically granted a tech interview. It's the least you can do for someone who put in the time toward your position.
• euphetar 4y ago
  I have found the following strategy to work well: pick your battles. Some employers use test tasks to keep you busy so that you can't apply elsewhere. Other employers genuinely test your skills, but even among them there are some with unrealistic expectations. You can't be doing all the test tasks, period. But you can avoid most of them without walking away. I am assuming an active job search where you have more than one potential employers. If the test task is simple and you have the time: do it. If the test task is interesting and you really want into this company: do it perfectly. If the test task is simple, but you don't have the time: write an email explaining how you have a full time job with lots of interviews, tell them your CV clearly demonstrates you have enough experience, ask to forgo the test task. If the test task is hard and you don't have the time: explain how you would do the task, ask to forgo the task as above, walk away if they don't agree. You would be surprised how often people will skip steps of the interview process if you ask nicely. This way I skipped tedious home assignments, psych tests and leetcode home assignment (not even hard, just told the company I don't want to rehearse dynamic programming with so many interviews lined up). In my recent job search I had two good offers and incidentally both were the ones where I did the test tasks 150% because they were interesting. So do them if they are worth it.
• theaccordance 4y ago
  You can take any position you like with your career, but I suspect you’re gonna be limiting yourself on available companies with this stance. A better position would be to improve how you evaluate a company prior to engaging in a coding test.
• deleted 4y ago
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• rossdavidh 4y ago
  I have never been asked to do a home assignment, and I am a contractor who gets a new gig every year or more. Having said that, I have seen it used by good companies. It was a case where the person's background was, as I recall, a music degree, and I think they were wanting to make sure he could program (he could). It's definitely a strike against a company, but it's something I would put on the scales against how good this job would be. Sometimes it might be worth it.
• JansjoFromIkea 4y ago
  I think if you give someone a take home assignment, especially a junior, and they complete it you owe them the offer of a call to talk through some feedback or a detailed text breakdown of what they could improve and where you think they may be lacking in knowledge. If they don't know where they're going wrong it's going to be quite hard for them to figure out how to improve it. As far as ghosting is concerned it's a bit baffling to me, seems far more in a company's interest to promote the notion of not ghosting so that they actually stand some chance at all of applicants letting them know when they've dropped out.
• deleted 4y ago
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• Dork1234 4y ago
  I really think these unpaid home assignments are just to rule out people with kids. You are expecting people wake up, get kids ready, work a 8+ hour day, commute (?), pick up kids, feed kids, and then after all of this be functional for some assignment that realistically has nothing to do the job I am applying for since it has been water down to fit into a "small" time frame.
  • dudul 4y ago
    How is it different if you ask them to take 2 or 3 1hour calls? At the end of the day, interviewing - regardless of take home, whiteboarding, pair programming, leetcode - is a time commitment. Yes people with a family or limited spare time are at a disadvantage, but I don't think there is a way around that.
• jacobyoder 4y ago
  I recently went through an interview/exam with a takehome portion. The company indicated "this shouldn't take more than 2-3 hours". For me, it was 2.5 hours. And... I wouldn't want to do dozens of these, but doing one or two every couple of years isn't too much of a burden, imo. But I know everyone's tolerance is a bit different.
• cbanek 4y ago
  I agree completely. These things are ways for companies to waste your time in the interview, and make it harder. Job interviews used to be 1 hour and a handshake. Then a reference check. Let me tell you why that was better than the current hiring meta. 1) I can learn everything I need to know in an hour with someone. 2 will likely not drastically give me a better idea. 8 hours with someone is not 8 times better, it just doesn't scale like that. So the idea that the more work you give a candidate, or the more interviews, or whatever, the better your hiring practice, it's just not true. 2) People can be very nervous in interviews. It's an intimidating, adversarial environment that has no relation at all to the job or work. It's almost the beginning of the way for the company to treat you as lesser, and they will take advantage of that to screw you these days. As you say, they will just ghost you. They didn't used to do this nearly so much. They'd at least send you a letter, or give you a call. 3) Even if 1 and 2 weren't true, the questions asked in interviews have no relationship with the real job. You just can't ramp up in time, etc. There's too much learning. Picture an intern. They do nothing except take everyone's time for the first month, but it's the rest that matters. Will they get something useful done before they leave? Maybe. But it does take a while to ramp up. So interview questions don't judge job performance. But we still do it, because people like that tinge of power I guess. That feeling of control in that you can say yes or no to someone, they have to placate you for the job, etc. A lot of interviewers I know act very strange in interviews too, and they don't act that normally. For the interviewee, it's even worse. You waste your time, you spend a lot of emotional energy, you don't know if you like the people you'd be working with, you don't know really what you'll work on, and no matter what you have to do what your boss says anyway, which can change at any time. Oh and it's "right-to-work" so they can fire you any time for any reason. It's much more useful to talk to their previous boss or friends or references. Even if they are biased, you can usually tell pretty quick again who is telling you nonsense. At least then you can hear real stories about real situations in the past, rather than useless hypotheticals. But we don't do that anymore because of liability from lawsuits in hiring. Because a lot of companies are actively discriminating. Some are passively doing it, some are trying to do better but are hopeless. So everyone is just covering their ass. Sounds like a great deal!
• seaourfreed 4y ago
  In order to get a $40k/year job, no. (This isn't your case) In order to get a $250k/yr job, probably yes. Putting an hour limit on them makes sense.
• soggybutter 4y ago
  Everyone's different, but I would happily take 6h of working at my own pace with full access to all of my normal tooling in a low pressure environment over 1-2h of high pressure speed coding using "tools" (web editors...ugh) I'm unfamiliar with. It sucks that you were ghosted, and I would view that more as an indictment on that company rather than the practice of a home assignment. To me there's no easier evaluation of skills you could ask for.
• faangiq 4y ago
  Even worse, imagine being the grader of such assignments. It’s a useful tool for identifying noob companies.
• smcl 4y ago
  If you're giving someone 6h worth of tasks, you really need to: a) be 100% absolutely certain that you definitely need this to evaluate the candidate (you most likely don't) b) if you do then you owe it to them to study their submission, run it, test it and provide clear feedback and honestly if they've broadly met the requirements you should interview them. The submission could form part of the interview process - maybe you pair program some changes together, or discuss part of the implementation. Basically if someone delivers six hours of work, you use it. c) No matter what, you communicate with the candidate throughout this process. There is absolutely no excuse for ghosting candidates. None
• joe8756438 4y ago
  I’ve been on both sides of the table, big company and small. The common interview practices, and the one brought up by OP, stem from a desire to have a system that doesn’t rely on trusting the candidate. I think this is a bad place to start. But how do you weed out people misrepresenting their ability? I think it’s a lot easier than most realize: first you need _something_ to talk about, have the candidate bring something they worked on. Then ask a ton of questions. Not just technical questions, questions about motivation, interest, reasoning, and taste. The argument against this is that not everyone has time to make something on their own time and it just shifts the privilege to those with a greater share of free time. I think there is something to that, BUT: the power to choose the subject is in the hands of the candidate not the interviewer, that to eliminate all the test-like processes seems like a fair trade.
• SergeAx 4y ago
  Hint: you may now use this work as a sample of your code for at least a year of interviews with other companies.
• buf 4y ago
  I wrote an article about this same thing. Stop interviewing with ad-hoc code quizzes, live or take-home. I've interviewed maybe 500 engineers in my career. I'm an early engineer of Instacart, 3rd engineer of Eventbrite, founding engineer of Reforge. Started 3 companies myself. My interview is always the same: 1. Bring code you've written 2. Share your screen 3. Explain what it does and I will casually ask questions about it You get so much information from this: - How they think about code - If they think it could be better - Who they blame if the code isn't the best - Personality - Product dev glimpses - Comms - Sentiment
  • mathverse 4y ago
    The thing is I dont even have a problem with a take home assignment as a method to validate some skills. I just detest the practice of not giving anything in return for the time you have invested in doing the assignment. I would not complain about this if candidates received good fedback.