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Because take-home exercises are both the best way to evaluate a candidate (I have never gotten a nasty "surprise" while hiring in companies that did take-home e

Because take-home exercises are both the best way to evaluate a candidate (I have never gotten a nasty "surprise" while hiring in companies that did take-home exercises: I mean it, absolute 0% "bad hire" rate, the only bad hire I got was a candidate that was allowed to skip the take home exercise) and they allow you to find absolute jewels amongst the candidate pool who are great, reliable engineers but regularly bomb regular interviews. While there are people who are naturally great at interviewing in person or who don't mind grinding leetcode for free for months on end, there is a whole "base of the iceberg" population who a) can't spend months grinding leetcode on end but they can definitely spare a couple of afternoons for one job they are interviewing for – these are normal people with normal jobs and a normal family who don't interview every month just for kicks, they do this a couple of times every 2-3 years, and, b) just cannot code while under stress. You may scoff at b) if you've never experienced it, and while I found it really hard to understand for a while as I also have no issues with getting into deep focus while people are looking and/or trying to talk to me and there's a time limit, it is absolutely real. Unfortunately, there is an extremely vocal minority (you) who go absolutely ballistic when asked to do a take-home exercise, who absolutely ruin it for everyone else and make hiring managers shit their pants whenever take-home exercises are suggested. I honestly don't understand why there's such an outrage, take-home exercises are the minority already, because there's a strange huge backlash. Sure, if you're a great communicator (usually native English speaker) and grind leetcode for fun so you can shove 5 interviews in one week, you hate take-home exercises. And that's fine, really, just please apply to the leetcode grinding contests and stop poisoning the well for the rest of us who would like to cater to the large amount of extremely competent engineers that don't fit that persona. > Nobody w/ actual responsibilities in their life should be coerced into doing something for free, for someone they do not know. I take it you haven't interviewed for a SE in a while? The status quo requires you to perform months of unpaid labor, not days, just in the form of memorizing the solutions to every single Leetcode Hard problem. How is that better?

raincole 4y ago
> I take it you haven't interviewed for a SE in a while? The status quo requires you to perform months of unpaid labor, not days, just in the form of memorizing the solutions to every single Leetcode Hard problem. How is that better? I guess because it kinds "scales". Once you are familiar with Leetcode you can use this skill to take interviews with different companies. Take-home exercises dont' "scale". That being said, I believe people are against take-home exercises exactly for the reason you support it: it's usable code. They worry the companies will exploit candidates by using their code for free. Leetcode is "useless" so it's safe.
- zimzam 4y ago
  I've never had a take home assignment that was "usable code" - they've all been toy problems.
- disruptiveink 4y ago
  For clarity, these take-home exercises that I'm referring to are completely toy problems. They're usually one or two REST APIs on top of a toy data structure (sometimes in-memory, without a DB at all), just to see how the candidate models, writes and tests code. An API that does some pricing math based on some in-memory state or the likes of it. If we're talking about "make me a website" kind of exercises that one could throw into production after some tweaks, then that is free labor and I would absolutely refuse those. Also, the fact that "leetcode scales" is part of the problem I was talking about. I really dislike the fact that if you train for months to develop a complete set of skills parallel and irrelevant to your actual role you can now efficiently interview for a number of companies that pay top dollar. So not only people with actual skills and experience are on equal (or worse!) footing than someone straight out of college, it also incentivises those who mastered leetcode to interview everywhere, since "it's all the same", while normal people who are good at their job get their torn to shreds after one or two interviews. So not only it's judging the wrong thing at the interview, but it's also causing a starvation situation for the candidates that are not playing that game. Why are we creating incentives to people becoming "professional interviewers"? This would be like Google encouraging SEO spam instead of fighting against it!
  - raincole 4y ago
    I agree with all what you said. I'm just speculating on why some people prefer leetcode over take-home exercises.

raincole 4y ago

> I take it you haven't interviewed for a SE in a while? The status quo requires you to perform months of unpaid labor, not days, just in the form of memorizing the solutions to every single Leetcode Hard problem. How is that better? I guess because it kinds "scales". Once you are familiar with Leetcode you can use this skill to take interviews with different companies. Take-home exercises dont' "scale". That being said, I believe people are against take-home exercises exactly for the reason you support it: it's usable code. They worry the companies will exploit candidates by using their code for free. Leetcode is "useless" so it's safe.

zimzam 4y ago
I've never had a take home assignment that was "usable code" - they've all been toy problems.
disruptiveink 4y ago
For clarity, these take-home exercises that I'm referring to are completely toy problems. They're usually one or two REST APIs on top of a toy data structure (sometimes in-memory, without a DB at all), just to see how the candidate models, writes and tests code. An API that does some pricing math based on some in-memory state or the likes of it. If we're talking about "make me a website" kind of exercises that one could throw into production after some tweaks, then that is free labor and I would absolutely refuse those. Also, the fact that "leetcode scales" is part of the problem I was talking about. I really dislike the fact that if you train for months to develop a complete set of skills parallel and irrelevant to your actual role you can now efficiently interview for a number of companies that pay top dollar. So not only people with actual skills and experience are on equal (or worse!) footing than someone straight out of college, it also incentivises those who mastered leetcode to interview everywhere, since "it's all the same", while normal people who are good at their job get their torn to shreds after one or two interviews. So not only it's judging the wrong thing at the interview, but it's also causing a starvation situation for the candidates that are not playing that game. Why are we creating incentives to people becoming "professional interviewers"? This would be like Google encouraging SEO spam instead of fighting against it!
- raincole 4y ago
  I agree with all what you said. I'm just speculating on why some people prefer leetcode over take-home exercises.