29 ms·

Tell HN: Interview take home assessments without feedback are frustrating

• solardev 3y ago
  Totally agreed. After an initial 30 min interview, I then spent something like 12 hours working on an atypical (for me) take home project. Actually really loved the challenge and learned a lot along the way and was excited to discuss it and learn more. Got a "Thanks, you're not moving on" message and that was it. Man, the rejection is totally fine, but I really do wish they could've spent a few min just explaining some details. I've gotten more thoughtful rejections from just cover letters and resumes, not to mention public PRs in strangers' repos. After spending so much time, it just feels like a betrayal of some unspoken developer ethos (vs say talking to a generic HR screener). If you're going to make someone code for you for hours and then dismiss their work, please at least tell them why in just a few sentences. You don't need to comment line by line in a code review, just general thoughts like "better code org" or "poor architecture and readability" or "better tests would've caught this major bug" or whatever. In my case this was a small company I was super excited to work for, and waited more than a year to finally have a chance to apply for (once my current job ended). It was definitely disheartening and makes it hard to want to try again with them in the future. But, you know, the other side of the coin is that maybe they're just getting swamped with so many applications they can't take the time to thoughtfully answer each one. I imagine I'm competing against a horde of more qualified ex FAANGers right now and maybe they're too busy trying to decide between the top 3 or 4 vs the long tail of hundreds of us who failed the take home. Who knows...
  • shakes_mcjunkie 3y ago
    > the other side of the coin is that maybe they're just getting swamped with so many applications they can't take the time to thoughtfully answer each one Maybe. At the point in the process where you're seeing someone's project, you've already spent time probably phone screening them, sending them the project, hopefully reviewing it. It takes relatively little time to write a quick sentence or two in review of the assessment. It would be nice even if they didn't look at the project and just said "sorry, we didn't have time to look at your project because we're moving forward with other candidates".
    • solardev 3y ago
      That's fair enough. Well, it's a good lesson to have gone through though. If I'm ever in a situation where I am asked to evaluate others in a similar fashion, I'll be sure to leave detailed feedback (if they want it), now that I know what it feels like.
    • labcomputer 3y ago
      > It takes relatively little time to write a quick sentence or two in review of the assessment Not just that: At every job where I interviewed candidates, HR expects some kind of feedback beyond just "hire"/"no hire". At least some bullet points of highs and lows, red flags, etc. If nothing else, this helps protect the company from false allegations of illegal discrimination by having documentation for why a particular candidate was rejected. It also helps recruiters to know if they're finding candidates who are "close to what we want" or "not even in the ballpark". Now, I know that some interviewers can be fairly blunt in their feedback, so you'd not necessarily want to just copy-paste it to the candidate, but the point is: that feedback already exists. The recruiter/HR just needs to (maybe) sand off some of the rough edges.
    • AnimalMuppet 3y ago
      If they're swamped, and they're asking all the ones they're swamped with to do a project that takes hours, that's abuse. Why abuse? Well, let's say they have three solid candidates. They ask each to do an assignment. Would I do a 6-hour project for a 33% chance at a job? Maybe, especially if I really wanted that particular job. Now let's say they have 30 candidates that they ask. Would I do 6 hours of throwaway work for a 3% chance at a job? No - not knowingly. If I'm an average candidate, I'm going to have to do that 30 times to land a job. That's 180 hours, or more than four full-time weeks of throwaway work. That's an abusive process. Could I spend just as much time interviewing? I could, but there's a difference. If I'm interviewing with you, you're there talking to me. You can't waste my time without wasting your own. Whereas with a take-home assignment, you can waste my time but waste little or no of your own. As a result, interviewers (usually) pay some attention to not doing needless interviews, but pay less attention to not asking for needless take-home assignments.
• harshalizee 3y ago
  Yep, been burned by this quite a bit couple of years ago. Since then, I've refused to do any asymmetric interview processes. Surprisingly, a lot of companies are willing to skip that part and go straight to the "on-site" interviews. If more engineers start to refuse these kinds of "dance, monkey, dance" processes, they'll start phasing them out.
  • civilitty 3y ago
    How do you phrase the rejection to maximize the chance of proceeding to the next interview stage?
    • WastingMyTime89 3y ago
      You don’t try to. You just say are not doing take home in a firm and polite way expecting things to end there and sometimes they think it’s still worth interviewing you.
    • akvadrako 3y ago
      I explain about the asymmetric risk part and just say it's an option if they pay for the time. Many companies are fine with this as hiring is expensive.
  • zyberzero 3y ago
    I once rage quitted a process. We had a few interviews, and then difficult take home test à la leet code (I spent 4-5 hours on them). Then the hiring manager came back, "all looks good! I need you to interview with the team, the CEO, the other team" and what not. I declined and said that I'm not spending 10 hrs in a process you asked me for (as in I didn't apply, they reached out to me). I got an angry email saying "what do you mean? We have only met with you for two hours?". I pointed out that it takes time to do the tests, then nothing more than crickets from the company. Not even a thanks for your time.
• Ancalagon 3y ago
  Yeah just don’t do these. Refuse. Usually it’s a bad sign. And I’ve only done one such interview where the time commitment was what they foreshadowed (about an hour), and then gotten the job offer. Every other time it was an email rejection with 0 feedback. Not worth it.
  • shakes_mcjunkie 3y ago
    These seem to be the standard for FE roles as far as I can tell. Probably 10/14 interview processes I've been in have said they have taken home assessments as some part of the process.
    • pdxandi 3y ago
      You could maybe offer a personal project repo or code example instead? Iv’ve walked through passion projects with interviewers before and found them insightful.
      • shakes_mcjunkie 3y ago
        I haven't had time in the past couple of years to keep up with side projects.
• NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
  I agree. I invested a few hours in a take-home once, while I was interviewing for a FT, high-dollar, in-office, position with my current employer. I think the only feedback I received after I submitted it was, "we've got two other candidates and we're moving forward with them and not you." It turns out that that position was eliminated within 12 months. If I'd been hired then I would be unemployed by now. So I'm amazed and grateful for my current position, with an incredible flexible schedule, 100% WFH, and all the rest. Sometimes things work out for the best when we least expect it.
• expertentipp 3y ago
  What's the contract between you and the company exactly? Yes, they have no obligation towards you whatsoever and they simply are pushing the border by probing how servile are you. Make a favour to the community and refuse to do take home assignments.
  • shakes_mcjunkie 3y ago
    I see what you're saying but I'm unfortunately in a position that I need to exit my current job ASAP. I don't feel secure enough to ask to skip takehome assignments.
    • expertentipp 3y ago
      > I don't feel secure enough to ask to skip takehome assignments. But you feel secure to have your time and self confidence burned? Because you will be ghosted or sent generic rejection email.
• danwee 3y ago
  Maybe offtopic: are take home projects or whiteboard excersises still needed for senior and staff positions? I had the impression that for anything below senior, yes these things were required, but for anything equal or above senior, the focus was mainly: systems design and communication skills.
  • 3oH2y869 3y ago
    I've seen both. In my experience it's been rarer to see a process with no coding involved, but it happens here and there.
  • ilc 3y ago
    When I was interviewing a year ago. They were required at all but one role I interviewed at. And I told them to test me anyways, despite them wanting to waive. If you are interviewing as a software engineer, you should be able to write FizzBuzz. Yes, it is stressful. Yes, I hate leetcode too. But, a company has every right to check that you at least know the basic skill you say you do.
    • ornornor 3y ago
      FizzBuzz, yes. A whole greenfield web app that would take this company several weeks to deliver? No.
      • ilc 3y ago
        (laughing) There are limits.
  • shakes_mcjunkie 3y ago
    It's been a requirement for the majority of interview processes I've been in for senior and staff positions.
• JohnFen 3y ago
  These sorts of assignments are terrible on many levels and, in my opinion, tells you something important about the company and what it will be like working there. If I'm presented with one, I take it as an immediate sign that I'd be a poor fit there and move on.
• 3oH2y869 3y ago
  Yeah, this happened to me this week. Honestly, I wouldn't worry about it. It sucks that they don't want to see more but it could be any number of things that they isn't working out for them. This experience you have doing the takehome, it's definitely going to help you out in the future in your next interview. Just think of each interview as another opportunity to learn and grow your interviewing skills :) But really, I think that interviewers should be gracious about takehomes. And if they're not, that gives you and indication of what kind of place it is to be.
  • shakes_mcjunkie 3y ago
    Yea using it as a learning opportunity is useful.
• iExploder 3y ago
  honestly if they dont pay for it or dont provide constructive feedback, upload it to github and link in your resume
• cochne 3y ago
  Yep. It is now my policy to not do any take home interviews. You should do the same. They don’t respect your time.
• nradov 3y ago
  Hiring managers should realize that only the most desperate candidates will agree to do take home assessments, or even apply to companies with such a process.
  • ozim 3y ago
    So you would rather do live coding session on a problem that is presented to you on the spot?
  • Larrikin 3y ago
    Last time I went through the hiring process, I asked my recruiterto prioritize companies that had homeworks instead of companies that expected whiteboard or on the spot coding in an unfamiliar environment with multiple people looking over my shoulder. Leetcode grinding for a whiteboard is a worthless skill outside of the interview. I'd rather code up something. If the project is over burdensome you can always pass. The best homework I got was a "working" project that purposefully had bad practices scattered throughout. You could elect to fix the mistakes or just document them for the interview.
• VoodooJuJu 3y ago
  Fortunately for employers, there's no shortage of applicants willing to take these insults. This is unfortunate for applicants who respect themselves, their own time.
• trabant00 3y ago
  Took a "2 hour" take home project after several rounds of interviews. Actually took an entire work day. They checked it and discussed it with me. Next step was the recruiter telling me they are afraid I'm not a good cultural fit. Never again. Oh, and the project smelled like something they actually needed in prod.
• lisasays 3y ago
  It's pretty insulting to be frank. As are interviews of any kind without feedback. I'm not referring to holistic feedback (let alone an explanation for why they don't move forward). I mean the kind where they grill you with question after question (often poorly phrased and sometimes insultingly basic) and don't provide any indication at all as to whether your answers are good or bad or not. They just keep going on, poker-faced - saying, in effect: "Don't speak unless spoken to".
  • lesuorac 3y ago
    > I mean the kind where they grill you with question after question (often poorly phrased and sometimes insultingly basic) I mean you'd be surprised at the number of people that can't write a for-loop ...
    • lisasays 3y ago
      The point is that for whatever level of fizz-buzzing they feel they need to - far too often these companies can't fizz-buzz themselves when it comes to basic interview hygiene. You know, like maybe reading the candidate's resume and cover letter (or talking to the recruiter to whom it was explained "I haven't worked with language X at all, is that OK?") before asking them to code over the phone for language X, for example. Or even post a job req that accurately reflects the true needs of the position in the first place. Or (getting back to the subject of this thread) when giving take-homes, provide reasonable instructions as to what is expected and by when (and under some reasonable time frame), etc -- see for example this chestnut, posted just now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36452104 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36452104 A two-way street, and a bit of common sense. That's all I'm asking for.
• revskill 3y ago
  This could be an opportunity for a business to review the take-home assignment. The idea is, if you submit to company A, they rejected without any feedback, let's other companies know about it, and both of you is in a win-win position.
  • awesome_dude 3y ago
    Glassdoor - interviews section
• SirensOfTitan 3y ago
  One company I interviewed with told me to spend no longer than 2 hours on a project. I complied and followed that time boundary, as I wasn’t paid for the interview and I didn’t feel it was fair to me to spend any more time on it than that. Long story short, the company passed on me, saying that my code was easy to understand and high quality, but I didn’t handle all of the corner cases. I listed most of the corner cases they mentioned in the readme as limitations from the time limit. It was clear that while they said to limit my time on the project, they didn’t really mean it. They wanted an exhaustively finished product in a ridiculous amount of time. At this point in my career, I’ll just decline interviews that don’t respect my time.
  • jmholla 3y ago
    I had a company ask me to put together a performance improvement plan involving proposed changes, instrumentation and engineering changes. They expected me to look at all their existing code, talk with engineering and other employees and put together this plan in 6-7 hours, an already ridiculously large time frame. I told them that allotted time was way too small for what they wanted and withdrew my application. It felt like they wanted me to put together a plan they could implement without paying or hiring me. Worse, I'd be working around their schedules to have these conversations so it wasn't really a take home assignment. I wish I had saved a copy of the assignment. It was ridiculous.
    • DethNinja 3y ago
      So was the company the best in their field? I sometimes see small / badly managed companies pull such interview processes and it is ridiculous. You would expect they would hire 100x engineers with these tasks but I wonder what they are exactly looking for.
      • jmholla 3y ago
        No. They were just starting out trying to sell their open source product. In fact, I had interviewed with a different company solving the same problem whose tech I thought was way more impressive.
• clusterhacks 3y ago
  I strongly suspect you are reading more into the review process than exists. There probably isn't any feedback worth having. I bet the hiring company got a bunch of "fine" or "ok" project submissions from candidates and then made somewhat arbitrary choices on who they would move forward with.
• jhj 3y ago
  I would suspect this is more likely than not (at least in the US) due to the problem of legal liability and shielding the company from lawsuits alleging unfair hiring practices if detailed feedback to the interviewee were given.
  • lapcat 3y ago
    People always claim this with no evidence whatsoever. Please cite the relevant court cases. The irony of these claims is that the possibility of lawsuits doesn't actually stop companies from doing terrible, lawsuit-worthy things. They do such things all the time. Occam's razor suggests the explanation is simply that companies don't care about job applicants. And this is demonstrated in many ways.
    • lesuorac 3y ago
      People do sue for not getting hired. https://www.eeoc.gov/newsroom/ruby-tuesday-pay-45000-settle-eeoc-age-discrimination-suit https://www.eeoc.gov/newsroom/ruby-tuesday-pay-45000-settle-...
      • lapcat 3y ago
        Yes, age discrimination is illegal. If your feedback is "You're too old", then you probably shouldn't give that feedback to the applicant. But you also shouldn't discriminate in the first place. If not giving feedback is an excuse to cover up illegal behavior, that's not a good excuse.
        • paxys 3y ago
          Legal does not have the time to screen 100% of feedback sent out to job seekers, and there’s plenty that a regular employee can say or write in casual conversation that can be used as fodder in a lawsuit. Hence the reason for these blanket policies. This isn’t some conspiracy theory but the reality of how corporations work.
          • 3y ago
• ilc 3y ago
  I think the real issue is the misapplication of take-homes. If after 3-4 rounds of systems interviewing, the company came back and said: "Hey we like you, and we're interested in making an offer, but we want to check your skills..." Yeah, I'd do the assessment. Especially if I did 1 round of 45m coding. Without that, the company can't verify that I have "FizzBuzz" level skills, and that I didn't cheat on the assessment. When it is upfront, it is rarely worth it on either side. Companies lose a large fraction of the engineers applying into their funnel, and honestly as an engineer, it is rarely worth my time. I can spend that time interviewing at other companies that respect my time. As with many things in life: It is when, and how things are done. Not what things are done that often matters.
  • arp242 3y ago
    Yeah, this is also my issue. You get a "take-home" after a short 15 minute intro call where some HR person basically just repeat what's on their homepage and job listing and where you repeat what's on your CV (I have a theory that HR people can't read, all observed evidence points in that direction anyway) and then you're given an 8 hour take-home. Sometimes you don't even get the intro call and just an email. Even just a "hey, we're genuinely interested and you made it to the shortlist" or something to that effect would just make a world of difference. Now I have no idea if I'm on any sort of shortlist or if they're just shotgunning this to everyone. I tried asking a few times, but I always got such vagueries in return that I might as well not have asked, so I stopped bothering. Would also help if people made the tests at least a little bit interesting. Now it's either "do this boring CRUD thing you've done 1000 times already" or "solve several NP-hard problems that have been subject of Turing awards within an hour". The last time I spent quite a bit of time on one of these things because it was interesting, and even put the result on GitHub (with no mention that it was for a take-home test, it "just" looks like any other project, also slightly modified to fit my needs). Then again, what's "interesting" for one person is "boring" for another.
    • ilc 3y ago
      I've handed fully containerized code, with 100% code coverage. (Separate entry point from default to run the tests.) Then been told no. I suspect the people weren't used to having someone hand in a basically 100% guaranteed to work program ;). (I do know 100% code coverage doesn't mean working. But the docker container helps a good bit in making sure the code will run in the environment I wrote it for.)
• sBqQu3U0wH 3y ago
  Sometimes I help to create take-home assessments and provide a feedback. It is not unusual for a candidate to submit something that is copy pasted from some introductory tutorial and / or completely ignoring most of the requirements. In cases like this I do not have much choice but to respond with a generic polite rejection. Honestly, I don't believe company should be responsible for providing any kind of feedback for your assessments - it's not a bootcamp. You are either competent and therefore suitable for the position or you are not, and it was your choice to apply. Moreover, you are not the only one applying and meticulously creating a report about what you have done good or bad, and where you can improve takes a substantial amount of time.
  • JohnFen 3y ago
    > In cases like this I do not have much choice but to respond with a generic polite rejection. Well, you do have a choice. You could tell them that they were rejected for copy/pasting or because the requirements were not met. You don't have to do into more detail than that.
  • shakes_mcjunkie 3y ago
    > Moreover, you are not the only one applying and meticulously creating a report about what you have done good or bad, and where you can improve takes a substantial amount of time. The report can be 1-2 sentences. It doesn't need to be meticulous or a "boot camp".
  • lesuorac 3y ago
    Do you encourage candidates to re-apply in the future or do they re-apply on their own? If-so, you're doing yourself a favor by providing feedback so that they might improve by the next time they interview.
• ctvo 3y ago
  If it's so insulting, stop subjecting yourself to it. Let me guess, white boarding is even more insulting, because don't they understand a developer of your experience can't be bothered to prepare for it? No one owes you anything. If these companies display poor behavior during the interview process, add them to a list, name and shame, whatever you think is appropriate and move on.
• wgerard 3y ago
  Hah, this is something close to my heart. A friend and I tried to start a company around this, basically resolving three big issues we saw with take-homes: 1) No feedback. If you spend a couple hours on something you should get meaningful feedback. 2) No clear criteria. Is the hiring company going to slam you on correct syntax? If so, you should know that upfront! 3) Time guidelines that had no enforcement and thus led to an arms race where candidates would spend ever-increasing amounts of time and skew the standard of what "good" is. So we fixed those things: 1) We provided the feedback, not the hiring companies, so legal liability was non-existent for the hiring companies. We double-blinded the process as much as we could (evaluators didn't know who the candidate was and vice-versa). 2) We told candidates upfront what they'd be evaluated on. Not down to the level of "you must implement this problem using a max heap", but we would say something along the lines of "The company is looking for an academic algorithmic solution to this problem" or similar. We would then only allow evaluators to evaluate them on these axes and nothing else. 3) We also strictly enforced time limits by basically telling candidates "hey you'll have 2 hours to submit from the time you hit start and see the prompt, so please make sure you have two hours from when you hit start." -- not ideal, obviously, but the best we could come up with to resolve #3 above. As you can probably imagine, the market just wasn't really there for this. I think candidates generally enjoyed it in comparison to the vague, unending slog that most take-homes are but: 1) The value prop just wasn't really there for most companies: They mostly use these types of evaluations on more junior candidates, and unfortunately the hiring market for junior candidates is highly skewed towards the employer. 2) More surprisingly, we realized the time their current engineers and managers spent evaluating these takehomes just wasn't really a consideration for them. We tried to frame it in terms of "here's how much it costs you to evaluate these take-homes wrt time spent vs. us", but it was a difficult sell regardless. We actually had the most success evaluating candidates from more non-traditional backgrounds upfront ourselves and then charging a placement fee if they were hired, but we ultimately didn't really want to continue that.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • wgerard 3y ago
    Side note: If anyone is interested in this space, highly recommend you check out https://www.woventeams.com/ https://www.woventeams.com/
• say_it_as_it_is 3y ago
  Did you sign an NDA about the assessment? Share your work with the world and ask for its feedback.
• ipaddr 3y ago
  Everyone does a few of these and gets burned by the no replies. These days I'll point to an open source project I wrote. If that is not good enough then they weren't interested in judging my coding style / sample and more interested in something unrelated
• sergiotapia 3y ago
  For every 9 leetcode interview companies, there is 1 that doesn't do that and would rather pair program or work on an actual ticket together for half a morning. Adjust your sights on those and it's lovely. More often than not those companies are great to work for across all metrics. Most of these leetcode interview companies just follow what Google does for that reason alone. And Google does it because they have to cull 20,000 applicants somehow in the first wave. They just _can't_ interview that many people from the jump.
  • torton 3y ago
    I try my hardest to design practical interviews when hiring. It takes time, but the results are worth it. For example, if you're an Ops style person, you would be SSHing onto a server or troubleshooting a configuration management system. Platforms like Woven do this automatically, but they miss the mark. A good half (if not more) of the value is observing the candidate working through the problem and responding to collaborative feedback, not in actually solving the technical issue in question.
• solardev 3y ago
  Although I complained about the lack of feedback in another thread here[1], I was pretty surprised by the number of people who hated take-homes and refused to do them at all. Why is that? Personally, even though I spent two days working on it and ultimately failing it, it was one of my favorite interview processes ever... way more efficient use of time for both parties, IMHO, and a better way to measure the actual skill set. And it was fast! I did the assignment in a couple days and then heard back from them in another day. That's way better than the other interview gauntlets I've had to run, which usually included 3-4 rounds of talking to a bunch of people, with weeks or sometimes months in between, and most of those folks are people I will never see again after the interview cycle. And there's also not the absurd pressure and ambiguities of real-time whiteboarding or live coding, which is not at all representative of how people normally work (with access to the internet, their preferred workstation and IDE, etc.). Having gone through one of those sessions, THAT feels way more like a "dance, monkey, dance" bullet dodged vs the casual take-home. By contrast, a take-home gives me a "just pretend it's a normal work day and show us how you work" situation and I can focus on the problem at hand instead of the politics of hiring. Isn't that a good thing...? What am I missing? [1]: My complaint was about the lack of feedback after a take-home, not the take-home itself (which was actually illuminating and fun): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36446949 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36446949
  • shakes_mcjunkie 3y ago
    I largely agree that take home assignments are better than the alternative.
  • MathMonkeyMan 3y ago
    The problem with take-home assignments, I suspect, is that nobody reads them. You don't read somebody's github portfolio, you don't really read their resume, and you certainly don't read their exquisitely written, commented, documented, and tested take-home project. If you even skimmed it, you're not going to sit down and summarize your impression. I'm not saying that all interviewers are lazy or bad, but most of the ones I've worked with are. Hell, maybe even I am. Time spent interviewing is time not spent working on things that you might actually be incentivized to do well.
• NovemberWhiskey 3y ago
  No HR function that's equipped with the typical level of risk aversion is going to allow feedback on why a candidate was not selected. There's simply no upside to it.
  • shakes_mcjunkie 3y ago
    There's always an excuse like this and TBH I think it's lazy.
    • NovemberWhiskey 3y ago
      The answer? Or the behavior of the HR department? Candidates are looking for feedback on what they can do better. HR doesn't want hiring managers to form opinions on that. HR wants (as near as possible) objective feedback on whether candidates meet a hiring bar, and for a hiring manager to select amongst those that do choose the best candidate. Ideally, they want you to make sure you're making serious consideration of candidates in under-represented groups in order to show commitment to DEI targets. Oftentimes, the reasons why candidates don't get selected come down to things like "you exaggerated your involvement in a key project and we figured that out during the interview" or "you're fine, but we found someone we liked better". How do you think honest feedback of "you should stop providing misleading descriptions of your work experience in your resume" goes over?
      • shakes_mcjunkie 3y ago
        > they want you to make sure you're making serious consideration of candidates in under-represented groups in order to show commitment to DEI targets. It's illegal to hire based on demographics. I'm sure lots of places do it. It's lazy to me for HR not to provide feedback to the candidate based on some "upside" or vague liability. > How do you think honest feedback of "you should stop providing misleading descriptions of your work experience in your resume" goes over? This sounds like a really contrived scenario. I've been the hiring manager for several positions and I've never seen enough evidence to call out a candidate for something like this. Anyways, if it were true, just find a nice way to say it: "we were unclear about your work experience and the details didn't match our job description".
• prewett 3y ago
  As an example of an effective take-home project, I was applying for a contract helping implement features for an open source project. Normally I don't like take-home project, but this project was interesting, so I was willing to give it a shot. It was basically implementing a 20-line function, but in order to implement it you had to be good enough at code spelunking to find the appropriate place to put the function, and then figure out the build system to build and debug the implementation. The implementation itself was fairly straightforward, maybe used a set or a map or something. When I was finished they talked with me about the implementation, and asked how I tested it. After I finished I realized that it was an effective interview project (even though I was annoyed at having to spend extra time), because it was designed to show if I could navigate an unfamiliar codebase and build system, which is an important skill, especially for an open source project. (I did get the contract, and it was definitely an interesting project to work with.)
• User23 3y ago
  Ask for feedback in writing before doing the assignment. If they agree great. If they don’t then walk.
  • shakes_mcjunkie 3y ago
    That's a good idea. I'm going to try it out.
• theogravity 3y ago
  Not one of the comments has mentioned a main reason why feedback isn't shared is certain people don't take critiques very well, or may think the reason for rejection is benign that it's not enough reason to reject. The company doesn't want to spend time getting into an argument with the person over it or potential legal issues arising from such feedback.
  • effingwewt 3y ago
    Then they can interview candidates without the takehome bullshit. Companies refuse to even read a resume/cv these days. They make you sign up for an account specifically with their company and jump through all their hoops and type into fields exactly the information covered in the resume/cv/cover letter. They have you write out answers to questions they later ask you again in person. Of companies don't want to spend the time that's fine, but they shouldn't expect prospective employees to waste exponentially more time. And arguably the job hunter is in the more desperate position, as evidenced by the fact we are willing to jump through all of the aforementioned hoops. Unpaid. For a chance at something. For which you may receive no feedback. Fuck that it should be illegal to do so unless they compensate us.
    • theogravity 3y ago
      I agree with the entirety with what you've said. Take home or not, most are reluctant to give specific feedback in general because they don't want to argue about their feedback to the interviewee and there is a potential for legal exposure if the interviewee thinks the feedback was unfair relative to some other group and wants to take action on that.
  • Aeolun 3y ago
    > The company doesn't want to spend time getting into an argument with the person over it I don’t want to either, but if the feedback they send is clearly bonkers then what am I supposed to do? If you have a dialogue in the first place you can correct their misconceptions immediately, but if they use take home the only time you can do this is after the fact.
• michaelrpeskin 3y ago
  I'd blame it on HR. I do the the technical part of the interview for my company. We have a very easy short take home project that's given out after the phone screen. I'm not a big fan of take home projects, but they are a good filter. I purposely made it representative of the type of problems we solve, but very simplified. A junior dev should finish it in under an hour. A senior dev in our field could probably code it up in 15 minutes. When I review the code, I have a small rubric and also attach a paragraph of comments to it before it goes back to HR. Apparently, that all gets filtered to a yes/no call back to the candidate. I didn't know this until I ran into a candidate and he said all he got was a "we're going to pass" call from our HR folks.
  • lisasays 3y ago
    I'd blame it on the CTO, for not knowing or caring what HR is up to.
• zarathustreal 3y ago
  100% I recently completed a take home challenge for a full-stack engineer role. Given a week and told I could request more time if necessary. Instructions specifically said "We're not looking for a pretty UI, we prioritize component structure and functionality." and "Use any framework you'd like." The challenge was to build a back end with four endpoints for CRUD operations on a resource representing an application for car insurance. The front end was a single form for updating and submitting the application. So naturally I whipped up a solution in less than 24 hours with simple pre-built components that both looked great and were functional (Mantine UI + Firebase) I submit the challenge and check the logs every day to see if they'd run the application. A week passes before I hear anything back from them, logs still showing that the front end was never visited, none of the CRUD endpoints ever submitted to. "We reviewed your submission, thank you for your time, best of luck in your search" Naturally, I respond confused about the claim to have reviewed my submission, wondering how they managed to test the functionality without visiting the site or making any submissions. I asked if I had misunderstood the challenge, asked if there was any feedback about how my submission fell short of their expectations. "We reviewed your submission based on the code you submitted and came to the conclusion not to move forward." ...yea long story short, I'm never spending time or money on a take-home challenge ever again.
• pandaman 3y ago
  If you want feedback - go with third party recruiters, they are eager to collect feedback themselves and the hiring managers share with them more openly than with a random candidate. Of course, there are issues with this way of job search (recruiters pressuring you to take lowball offers, double submitting, putting a negative weight on your application with their fee, generally being unable to work with companies that do not work with such recruiters, etc) so it might be not worth it. After all, the only feedback that really matters is the number on your paystub.
  • goostavos 3y ago
    What possible feedback are people looking for after an interview, though? I've done 100s of interviews throughout my time at FAANGs. The bulk of the feedback generated is just low-value snap judgements made by people who really don't want to be there. It's a dice roll. You either land in a loop that (a) has more people that like you rather than dislike you, and (b) asks questions you know how to answer, and, by far most importantly, that you answer in the way that lines up with their biases, or you're dropped as an incompetent rube. One of my coworkers at Amazon was leaving for greener pastures. Before she left, for the lols she showed me the feedback she left when she interviewed me. It was something absolutely brutal along the lines of "doesn't appear to be able to code at all" (I was offended upon seeing this "feedback"!). My point being: interviewing is stupid, and, generally speaking, there is no valuable feedback to be had from the process.
    • pandaman 3y ago
      I agree, the feedback often makes no sense (this is probably why most companies do not give it to candidates), but if you want it - you can get it from a third party recruiter anyways.
• opportune 3y ago
  Takehomes have been ruined as a concept by companies that spam them out before applying a first pass. I’ve passed interviews at demanding companies like hedge funds, Google, Facebook, Snap. Not once have I “passed” a take home interview even when I know I got the solution correct. Sorry, but I refuse to do them now. Companies need to be able to show a token investment in time with an actual engineer interviewing me for me to be convinced they are actually considering me as a candidate and didn’t just send me a takehome link without any due diligence because it costs them nothing to do so.
  • Hermitian909 3y ago
    I get the impression avoiding take homes is becoming standard advice. I hang out in a few communities of engineers (alumni groups etc.) and it's gotten to the point that many people see requiring a take home as a red flag. Not just because of how companies abuse it, but because if basically everyone the company has hired put up with a take home there's a strong chance you don't hire good engineers.
    • 908B64B197 3y ago
      That's the reason I advise against them. Unless you are the top company in your bracket, your completion rate will also not be so great for a take-home (people have limited time: they'll sort by how good your company is). Sure they'll do Google's take-home but local business that does local comp/prevailing wages? It's at the bottom of the pile. By the time they get to it, the best candidates will already have an offer from a better company. That's why I prefer to bring people on-site as soon as possible, and do a little whiteboard (the point being that the candidate must... know how to code!). It's an artificial challenge that's really a pretext to have a technical discussion. Only time I advise to use take-homes is when you are dealing with a massive number of applicants from institutions that have a poor signal to noise ratio. Bootcamps come to mind. But then you end up with candidates that have the homework done by someone else and it ends up not being a good filter either.
      • berkle4455 3y ago
• CacheRules 3y ago
  Has anyone ever gotten a decent job from an interview process like this one?
  • shakes_mcjunkie 3y ago
    TBH my past 2 jobs requested a take home assessment. 1 was a great job, 1 has been a nightmare.
• awesome_dude 3y ago
  It's a really bad smell if they don't give you feedback - is that a company that can provide quality code reviews to its staff, or not.
• lee101 3y ago
  [dead]
• py_or_dy 3y ago
  I did over 120 combined interviews/phone screens/take home tests,etc for about 55 different companies between 2020-2022. Imo, unless it is for a big tech company, interviewing is just not worth it. Sadly I get too nervous to even try out for any of the big tech companies. Plus I'm white and in my 40's. Companies now really want people out of high school/code camp that can program in python or javascript and pay $25 an hour. If a smallish company is handing out take home tests they are only to waste your time. Most of the companies I interviewed for were looking for 3-5 new devs. In some extreme cases I was told they were looking for 10-30 devs in the next 3 months. Here we are nearly 2 years later and I browse the company linkedin page and the employees listed are still the same ones. They never hired anyone. I depleted my $60k life savings in my 18 months of unemployment. If it wasn't for my faith in a "God" and my family, I would have just killed myself via a stent of extreme drug use and homelessness. I haven't drank or smoked since high school. I did get a couple of brief contract jobs but was quickly fired/laid off. But that little bit of money on top of the stimulus payments are what got me into 2023. Then found a backend dev job for a porn site. There was no interview, I was the only one that applied. I now work with the worst code and the laziest people. But it is the coolest team. There are no "PC' police or HR nazis here. Money pours in. I work like 10 hours a week and feel like I'm in heaven. Oh, but onto your questions. So yes it is frustrating. And as far as feedback. I stopped asking for feedback because it was always maligned. Nobody will really know why you didn't get hired, remember, these companies aren't really hiring unless you are young and cheap. In most cases my feedback sounded like it was almost for someone else. Like "needed more linux experience (I haven't touched a windows or mac OS since 2005). Or my favorite, after talking about a data warehouse I built to house 5TB of data and 15 billion rows, and all the different schemas I migrated through, their reason was they wanted someone with "more database experience".
  • andrekandre 3y ago
    > these companies aren't really hiring unless you are young and cheap is this because its expected that younger workers work longer hours?
    • shakes_mcjunkie 3y ago
• sys_64738 3y ago
  Tell them a firm No to any of this nonsense.
• alexfromapex 3y ago
  Based on my extensive 10 years of interviewing experience and the sentiment in this thread, I think if take-homes are part of the process you probably should just not apply unless it's paid.
• Aeolun 3y ago
  I have gotten feedback on 3 take home projects so far, and in my experience the experience is much worse than getting no feedback at all. The responses are arbitrary, and mostly based on the reviewers preferences. And then knowing that what they think you did wrong makes no sense, you still have no recourse.
  • doctorpangloss 3y ago
    From my experience as an employer / owner, this is a complex issue. In the past, when I was a middle-of-the-totem-pole decision maker, we administered a take home. I wasn't really empowered to give feedback, but as far as I know nobody did. The best take home test had a joke in the comments. We were a game company, so it made sense for us - you have to care about entertainment. Today, as the ultimate decision maker, I ask only to see pre-existing code with git blame turned on, and I review it on screen with the candidate. In this context the candidate receives feedback, and it's almost entirely focused on style because IMO that is the single greatest predictor of actual coding experience. Let's discuss the underlying issue here: ineligibility, of like 30-50% of candidates. In this context, take homes make sense, because they occur in the absence of any other legitimate reason you should talk to someone. For example, here are my tech company LinkedIn Talent Solutions screening questions: Have you completed the following level of education: Bachelor's Degree? What is your level of proficiency in English? During our call, will you be able to share recent source code, wholly authored by you, of a game, application or website you worked on? Out of 20 candidates, 12 could answer Yes to all three. What exactly should we do with the remaining 8? I can see how a take home can address the ineligibility.
    • jawns 3y ago
      Why would you expect anyone currently employed to be able to share code they've written? Presumably, their employer would not permit that. Oh, they should also be writing code in their free time, as a hobby? Well, maybe. Or maybe they have other hobbies, or other responsibilities. Doesn't mean they don't do a good job when they're on the clock.
      • 3y ago
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• dayofthedaleks 3y ago
  I have interacted with more than a handful of job postings where the invitation to create a take-home deliverable was clearly a) an attempt at labor theft or b) a manager using the process to catch new buzzwords and troll for ideas to take to their team, which is still a form of labor theft. At this point I view the practice as a signal the position wouldn't be a good fit for either party.
  • 29athrowaway 3y ago
    What if you add a license to your code deliverable, mentioning it is only to be used for interviewing purposes?
    • cmckn 3y ago
      I mean sure, why not; but unless they want to open source your interview code, that license doesn’t really have teeth. Just another reason to decline take-homes, IMO.
      • 29athrowaway 3y ago
        Then just send a link to this https://youtu.be/SCaAetNzXIc https://youtu.be/SCaAetNzXIc ("you are an idiot" video)
• paulcole 3y ago
  Are you really going to be happy with 5 minutes of effort from a recruiter? If you got 5 minutes of their effort, then you’d ask for 15 minutes from an engineer. You want these jobs more than they care about you as a candidate. If one of the companies that sent you a rejection had instead hired you, would you be insulted about how they treated the other candidates? No, you’d probably take the job and be happy you got it. It’s a game and you’re each playing by your own rules.
• Gualdrapo 3y ago
  This has been the story of my professional career. For example at one place here, Centro Ático of Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, they assigned people to create a whole website (several pages pulling media) with plain HTML+CSS+Javascript, which I did. I don't remember how much time they gave but it took days. Even I pulled an all nighter on that because it was that demanding and I had a full time job at that moment. After that, they selected the ones they liked the most and called them for a presential interview. They called me, I had to make up an excuse at work so I could go to that. Ghosted. Never heard from them afterwards. Same with many other places where they make you feel at home and the communication seems to be great - most recently, at "RebelMouse". With the Silicon Valley Bank thing they told it wasn't a sure thing they would hire someone. I did the test anyway. After several weeks they told me they finally were reviewing my test. But more weeks passed and never heard anything. Asked them about that, even saying something like "I don't think you're the kind of company that ghosts people!"... But turns out they are.
• progman32 3y ago
  On my last gig we were specifically forbidden from giving feedback because of nebulous "liability" reasons.
• behringer 3y ago
  I honestly can't believe anyone would want to work for a company that gives you unpaid homework.
  • bubblethink 3y ago
    There is an asymmetrical power balance here. And there are lots of unknowns. You are often working with a lot of constraints and in the moment, you'll make concessions. So I don't blame the candidates.
• gered 3y ago
  It's been surprising to me to read through the comments posted here and seeing how most people seem to really despise take-home assignments during the interview process. Speaking as someone who absolutely hates live-coding something during an interview (unless, maybe, by chance it's a practical exercise ... something like "build up this simple CRUD web service" ... not "solve this leetcode problem" ... but this is pretty uncommon in my experience, unfortunately), I rather like take-home assignments. As long as they don't take any more than 1-3 hours. I've been in situations where I've declined a take-home assignment that was given to me where I estimated it was going to take 10-20+ hours. No idea why any company would think that is reasonable. For myself, what I hate is when the take-home assignment comes first. Like, before you talk with anyone at all, or maybe immediately after you did the 15 minute HR/recruiter screen. If I get a take-home assignment at that point, I decline. There's no denying the fact that a take-home assignment is a large investment by the candidate on this random chance to get the job. I'm not willing to make that investment unless I've gotten a chance to talk to at least _some_ of the people I'd be working with at a company to better gauge what the situation is and whether I think it's a good fit for me. Even a 15-minute HR/recruiter screen is not going to do that. So yeah, if they just throw the take-home assignment at me right off the bat ... yeah, no thanks. This all being said, yes, it is frustrating though to have to go through a bunch of these and get rejected with no feedback, or just ghosted, yeah.
  • irrational 3y ago
    I’d rather do neither. That’s the main reason I have never done in person or take home coding tests in the 20+ years I’ve been conducting interviews. So far we haven’t hired a dud.
    • gered 3y ago
      I mean I agree with you on this, but the idea that you can gauge a person's skillset through conversation (gasp!) and talking about your craft and details about past projects, etc seems to be totally lost on people today.
      • quesera 3y ago
• chirau 3y ago
  The reasoning for not giving you feedback is: "Why should we give you feedback and basically prep and improve you for your next interview at a different company?" If you are given feedback, the company is basically doing the prep work for the next company at their own expense. There is no ROI in giving you feedback if you did not make it. It's harsh, but true.
  • noman-land 3y ago
    It's the right thing to do to treat people with respect and not come across as a trash company full of assholes. Candidates talk too.
    • mattkrause 3y ago
      I got some very thoughtful and actionable feedback after an interview at IBM and it certainly made me think better of them.
    • chirau 3y ago
      There is no right or wrong here. You have an expectation for feedback, that is true and fair, and they have no obligation to give it to you. Would it be nice? Sure, in your eyes, probably not worth it in theirs. Is either of you in the wrong, no. Managing expectations is always advisable. If you go on a date with someone and they decide not to go out on another date with you, they have zero obligation to tell you why they won't be doing the second date. As nice as it would be for you to know why.
• jacknews 3y ago
  I just spent a couple of days on one, albeit longer than it could have been because I getting back into the language and ecosystem after an absence. No feedback at all, or even any aknowledgement that they'd looked at it, until a couple of weeks later with a request for a tech inteview. I just refuse to do others, sorry. If they want a hands-on test, they can pay me to fix a ticket, or even just pay me to do a test project. It's a small sum for them - for me it's multiple hours, over multiple interviews, all for free, it's basically a full-time unpaid job, just BS.
• db48x 3y ago
  Vague feedback is just as bad. I once “failed” a take–home assessment and was told that my solution “wasn’t object–oriented enough”. Bullet dodged, I’d say!
• asah 3y ago
  Tell me about it!!! blame the lawyers. I'm on the other side and having to reject dozens and dozens of candidates after they spent 30+ minutes on these takehomes, and can't tell them why. My only solace is that 30mins on a takehome beats an hour in a live interview. (my other solace is that we try to make the questions interesting and non-trivial, and we encourage candidates to use ChatGPT and then edit the answers, since the questions are just a bit too tricky for LLMs) (hiring DevOps/SRE for wide area distributed compute: https://www.joinmassive.com/jobs?gh_jid=4236238005 https://www.joinmassive.com/jobs?gh_jid=4236238005 )
• GoToRO 3y ago
  There are a lot of companies that give take home projects only to get free work. I always pass.
• paxys 3y ago
  I might be jaded after many years in the industry but to me not getting interview feedback is the default state of things. I don’t know why anyone would expect it. If a company provides it - great, it just means they haven’t yet run into a lawsuit and HR hasn’t put a blanket ban in place.
• bhasi 3y ago
  Interviewed with a company recently and they gave me a take home assessment after my initial round with the hiring manager. This being my first take home assessment ever, I excitedly sat down to solve it. I took about a couple of days (had other things to do) and sent it over. I even wrote some basic tests despite the instructions saying that they were okay to skip (wanted to impress my interviewers). Got rejected a week after submission with no explanation. It was a really good problem and I had fun solving it and it satisfied all the requirements correctly. When, disappointed, I asked them for feedback, the recruiter simply said that they "felt that it fell under their expected level" and that "The team has a very high bar set for this role and have made it a point to make sure people who join the team can contribute immediately which unfortunately means tough decisions like this have to be made". They didn't share any specific feedback on my code despite my following up for more specifics. Really pissed me off.
  • vsareto 3y ago
    >can contribute immediately which unfortunately means tough decisions You probably dodged a stressful position. Companies or teams that can’t allocate time to onboard talent are likely poorly run and can’t afford to invest in people. “Contributing immediately” is a fair indicator of that problem.
    • JohnBooty 3y ago
      Poor onboarding is one of the most baffling common ailments in this industry. There are so many hard problems in this industry. Onboarding is not one of them. Typically what I have seen is that management is so busy striving for short-term deadlines etc. that they "can't spare" engineer-hours to help the new engineer properly. Heck, I've been one of the senior engineers that has not had sufficient time to spare for the new people - not by my choice. In other situations we've had new engineers inserted into our teams with zero notice -- so we've not even had the time to prepare some "day 1 wins" for the new person. It seems incredibly obvious to me that great onboarding is a true force multiplier. Last place I work paid a lot of fake lip service to the importance of onboarding. But the reality is that we were judged strictly by the numbers in terms of commits, Jira tickets closed, LOC, etc.
• throwaway892238 3y ago
  Name and shame on Glassdoor. I will skip companies that I can tell are a garbage fire of hiring or working
• renewiltord 3y ago
  I would only take-home for interns from college, if anyone. High quality experienced hires will not do this because the market is such that no one subs take-homes for interviews; it's always in addition. They will simply say no, and you'll lose them. This is a classic example of a test that has adverse selection. You think by increasing the difficulty of hiring that you get better people, but actually you get worse people because the better people do not need to do this. This also means something about the person running the test, though. They are not experienced enough in the engineering hiring pipe to know what to do (i.e. they are unable to differentiate good engineers from bad engineers) and either do not know or do not care about the adverse selection. This means their team is likely to be mostly mediocre engineers. You should pick it only if you need a job. Essentially, the interview process is part of how you find out whether the team you're going to be working with is good. If you believe a certain process would not result in being able to differentiate a high-quality eng from a low-quality eng, and they're running that process: you should increase your likelihood that that firm contains many low-quality eng.
• arbus5672 3y ago
  I run the recruitment process for our small firm. Here is our process that has minimized frustrations like the link OP describes: Every candidate that we are interested in from the resume pool gets a screening call from an engineer. If they pass it, they get the option of their technical test being take home or over interview. If they do the take home version, we have a marking rubric for the features that we are looking for in a solution along with sample solutions at the different levels. Anyone who does the take home assessment gets feedback about their submission based on that rubric so that the feedback is consistent across the multiple interviewers. In some cases, we also share our solution if the candidate had follow up questions on the feedback that was provided.
  • calvinmorrison 3y ago
    My email interview, and job i got later at fastmail was for an Ops/Sysadmin job. The todo list was simple, go write a basic logrotate script. I was hired and worked there for a few years. I don't hate take homes. I don't think they're as much of an indicator of quality or a company litmus test as people here think it is
    • arbus5672 3y ago
      There may be a bias of opinions here of people who otherwise are totally qualified for the job that they are applying for bemoaning all the hoops that they have to jump through to show that they are qualified. I’d say about a good one in eight people who have passed the phone screen end up with shockingly dismal results in the technical screen. There really is a bimodal distribution of skill in the industry. The goal of these assessments isn’t to see how good folks are but to weed out those who are absolutely terrible.
      • calvinmorrison 3y ago
        Right. I usually just offer up my personal repos (not on git hub). Proof in the pudding i am a truly middling programmer but certainly not faking my middleness.
• michaelcampbell 3y ago
  It varies a lot, but seems worse lately. Not to "1-up" you, but I once interviewed at a company where the interviewers were not only not allowed to tell me what I got right or wrong of their questions (where there was a right/wrong answer), but were strongly discouraged from any sort of non-verbal cues about it. I was told later this was to prevent interviewer "A" from giving me any answers that "B" might later ask. Insanity. Someone much later said this was their "Kobyashi Maru" interview. I didn't pass it; probably for the best.
  • 7speter 3y ago
    The kobyashi maru scenario is to see how you act in a no-win situation. Kirk passed by cheating.
• ryanblakeley 3y ago
  A software labor union with licensing would save a lot of trouble.
• 23B1 3y ago
  If you are a company using this technique for hiring – and you're not providing feedback – STOP. If you and your team cannot suss out someone's capabilities from their CV, portfolio, interview, and references then YOU SHOULD NOT INVOLVED IN THE HIRING PROCESS. It's a shit-test that you believe helps filter out under-qualified/unmotivated candidates, but it actually has the opposite effect: Experienced candidates (you know, the ones you actually want at your company) just move on to lower-friction interviews where they don't have to start jumping through nonsensical one-way value exchanges on Day 0.
  • dudul 3y ago
    Resumes and references have no value. I can put whatever I want on my resume. I can give you any phone number I want for my reference.
    • 23B1 3y ago
      If you're comfortable lying about your experience and references, you're probably comfortable with cheating on a take-home assessment.
  • dccoolgai 3y ago
    But I can have my cake and eat it, too! I'll find the one who is stupid enough to do these things, but smart enough to build my industry-disrupting product!
• Uptrenda 3y ago
  [flagged]
• colechristensen 3y ago
  Absent unusual circumstances (I did actually do one recently) the answer when asked to do anything alone is no, with an explanation that such tests do not respect my time and a hint that asking for such commitments might be discriminating against people whose protected class life situation prevents them from giving away hours of their time for free.
• martinohansen 3y ago
  I took a take-home assignment from fly.io a while back; they promised that every completion would receive real human feedback. As far as I remember, I was told it would take a few hours, maybe 4, but the assignment looked rather fun, so I thought, whatever, let’s do it. Maybe I didn't understand the assignment fully or missed some cues; I don't know. But it took me roughly 10 hours spread across two days. After 5-6 hours, you don't feel like throwing the work away; you just want to finish. It was pretty frustrating. After returning the assignment, I waited the two weeks they asked for and heard nothing. I sent one email, waited a week, got no reply, sent another, waited some more, and still received no reply. I ended up sending a handful of emails to various addresses I could find. I even sent a DM on Twitter to one of the founders to let them know. No reply anywhere. Overall, it was a pretty bad experience.
  • shakes_mcjunkie 3y ago
    That's very frustrating, I'm sorry you had that experience. The most time I've spent is ~4 hours and I've definitely gotten to that point where I'm like I don't know if it's worth it but I should just finish it. And yea, to not get anything back from the reviewer/recruiter after that just feels bad.
  • bicx 3y ago
    Damn, I thought fly.io was better than that.
    • uoaei 3y ago
      Come to think of it, the only material that said that was their own.
    • mrkurt 3y ago
      We're not. We've had issues losing track of candidates over the last year. This is one of those all or nothing problems, a 0.5% failure rate is pretty bad for many human beings.
  • sosodev 3y ago
    I did a fly hiring project and was simply told I wasn’t good enough to move on. Zero explanation as to why. I found it very frustrating too.
• devoutsalsa 3y ago
  As an interviewee, I don’t really feel great about take home exercises. If the exercise is really tight in scope & it’s more of a validation of whether one can code at all, that’s not so bad, but coding exercises are almost never like that. Coding exercises I’d be ok with: - fix all the bugs in this repo to get the tests to pass - implement a feature to show basic understanding of a concept - do some quiz or puzzle to show you can achieve a discreet objective - refactor some code to clean up a mess - show you can use their SDK in a sane way Ways to evaluate a coding exercise I can support: - if you can complete this exercise, that’s all we care about - we’ll use this exercise to implement another feature in a pair programming exercise - using it as an introduction to the type of work one might be doing - communicating that we like to give candidates a chance to code without the pressure of someone staring at them in a live interview - promising an up or down vote on every exercise submitted - doesn’t require back and forth with a someone to ask a bunch of questions, mostly because it really drags out the interview process Basically if a take home exercise anticipates all the common objections to a take home exercise, tries to address those expectations, and has an attitude of “this sucks for us as much as it sucks for you”, I’m happy to jump through reasonable hoops.
  • shakes_mcjunkie 3y ago
    > - we’ll use this exercise to implement another feature in a pair programming exercise One of my take homes had a follow up like this and I did enjoy it. The interview went well but then I got rejected with very confusing feedback. It's hard to win as an interviewee.
    • devoutsalsa 3y ago
      Interviewing is a grind, even under the best of circumstances.
• oneepic 3y ago
  I only saw this mentioned in 1 other top-level comment -- ChatGPT (and yes, sorry, you may be sick of hearing about it). There's a perspective starting to come up, ie ChatGPT is ruining take-homes. This tweet[1] is one example from the hiring side, but I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up flooding their inboxes and your submission suddenly is competing for time with a bunch of bots. [1] https://twitter.com/djsmith42/status/1661156114883567616 https://twitter.com/djsmith42/status/1661156114883567616
  • cortesoft 3y ago
    If a developer can complete a take home test with ChatGPT, can they also do their regular job with ChatGPT?
    • whateveracct 3y ago
      Take-home tests tend to be simplified and well-defined questions. Not like real life and definitely something ChatGPT would do better in.
    • CSMastermind 3y ago
      Take home assignments are poor indicators of someone's actual software engineering ability. Unless you think of software engineers as some nameless, faceless, machines that you feed requirements into and get code out of. ChatGPT just highlights how poor of a job takehome assignments do at evaluating software engineering talent because it literally is a nameless, faceless, machine that you feed requirements into and get code out of. In a live interview with a competent interviewer they're watching to see your thought process, how well you articulate your thought process, how you problem solve, etc. Very little of the interview or their feedback about it should be focused on the syntax of your code. In addition to being disrespectful of a candidate's time, takehome interviews lose all those important signals.
      • imiric 3y ago
        Hard disagree. Following your logic, individual contributors working remotely are not software engineers, which is ludicrous. The thought process or tools they used to reach a solution is not as relevant as the solution itself. Interviewers shouldn't just review syntax, but efficiency, comprehension, algorithms, creativity, and many other attributes the code itself tells you. After all, these are things we spend most of our time evaluating in code reviews. Communication is also key, which can be evaluated in a live review of the code. Programmers are usually happy to talk about their code, and here you can assess not only if they actually wrote it, but what tradeoffs they made, what difficulties they ran into, how they would further improve it, etc. This is also a chance for the interviewee to evaluate the company's code review process; what they focus on, how _they_ communicate, etc. It's incredibly valuable for both sides. What live coding assesses most is the ability to think on your feet, and performance under the spotlight. This is an unnatural state for programming, which requires deep and creative thinking, often done best in isolation. Not to mention that it's heavily biased against individuals with any form of performance or social anxiety, which sends all the wrong signals you don't want when evaluating someone's programming abilities. AI tools are simply an evolution of the software engineer's toolbelt, and if they're allowed on the job itself, they should also be allowed in the take home assignment. It's a mistake to create fake working conditions for potential hires that don't exist for actual employees. At that point you're evaluating based on some fabricated environment, and won't be certain what it's like to work with this person, which is the only thing that ultimately matters.
• anotheraccount9 3y ago
  Nurse here. A couple years ago, went for an interview at a hospital. Had to complete an exam in <1h. Some of the questions included drawing the anatomy of a heart, medication calculation, etc. I was never told if I passed. Went for a4-persons interview (they were 1h late...), and was offered the job (which I declined). Is it really necessary to assess someone using an exam when they have a professional license, references, and experience? Oh well.
  • damethos 3y ago
    > Is it really necessary to assess someone using an exam when they have a professional license, references, and experience? Yes.
• j45 3y ago
  This could be an interesting product idea. Link the assignment for the applicant to the dev team to anonymously help with.
• 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
  I did one where it took them a week to get back to me with, "not enough documentation" when documentation wasn't even a requirement and I did do documentation- just not enough. I suspect they just didn't like my choice of Perl- don't give me a choice then :)
• jameshush 3y ago
  Last two jobs I interviewed at give me take-home tests that took 8 hours to complete each. ...but both paid me a great amount of money to complete them so I’m not complaining at all. Paid take-homes are definitely my favorite way to interview. The process doesn’t scale past 100 or so hires but if your company hasn’t hit that point yet I recommend it.
  • shakes_mcjunkie 3y ago
    I did get a $30 gift card for one take home assessment which was a nice token. Better than nothing I suppose. They also had a timed coderpad which was nice in the sense I knew all other candidates would be evaluated the same. But in the end, they rejected my project though with no feedback. Can't win.
• jamesgill 3y ago
  The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing otherwise smart people that job interviews are quantitative, unbiased processes rather than emotional, biased crapshoots.
• VirusNewbie 3y ago
  I don’t do them period. If you’re going to take my time, burn an engineer hour as well to show i’m a serious candidate.
• RomanPushkin 3y ago
  You're so 2013... Nobody takes home assessments now. Why bother, there are 1) plenty of companies who do not require that 2) those who require do not respect those who spend time on these assessments 3) even if you post about this everywhere, there is a very small chance you can change anything There are other job search hacks out there that work x100 better than assessments. Can't share them for obvious reasons
  • shakes_mcjunkie 3y ago
    > plenty of companies who do not require that I'd love a list. > even if you post about this everywhere, there is a very small chance you can change anything What's your point? Don't post?
    • RomanPushkin 3y ago
      I am happy to hear you'd love a list, I can compile the list for you for the little price (1/2 of my hour pay), reach out to my email in profile.
      • shakes_mcjunkie 3y ago
        No thanks
• Tainnor 3y ago
  Happened to me too once, and I agree: it's just insulting and disrespectful. It was also an ssignment with a hard time limit in my case, something that I will likely never again agree to (unless I get offered insane amounts of money or it is somehow my dream job but...).
• jiva 3y ago
  I was ghosted by Tenable after spending about 48 hours completing their CTF challenges, so I just posted the interview questions/challenges and my solutions to my GitHub. https://github.com/jiva/tenable_zero_day_assessment https://github.com/jiva/tenable_zero_day_assessment
  • bdelay 3y ago
    It looks like you made the best of a frustrating situation and, at the very least, have an excellent piece for your portfolio. With the rise in number of new security engineers all competing for few "security research" jobs (security research/hacking is the "I want to be a game developer" of security), you start getting into these convoluted hiring processes. Unlike standard software engineering, there aren't even remotely enough positions to accommodate everyone, so the bar can get absurdly high. Honestly, if the team is asking CTF questions, they clearly want hires with previous CTF experience and should just do targeted hiring from the top teams at different conferences. At least send people a free t-shirt if they complete the challenge.
    • the_only_law 3y ago
      > With the rise in number of new security engineers every year all competing for few "security research" jobs (security research/hacking is the "I want to be a game developer" of security) I’ll believe it, curious what other options there are for all those other new “security engineers”. Compliance work?
      • bdelay 3y ago
        If you're new, it's the same advice as any other field. Find a way to stand out. Build a portfolio, have great grades, come from a good university program, ping contacts from your alumni network, do bug bounties, find and fix issues in open-source, etc.
• robbywashere_ 3y ago
  I agree 100% Politely decline and move on. Those 2-4hrs can be better spent applying to other positions. Think of all the other openings you could apply to in that amount of time? 25-30? A conservative 10, with a good cover letter. Good luck with your search!
• luisgvv 3y ago
  Only once I did a take home and I passed & got an offer. Even though it was a mildy challenging I hated it. Tbh if I didn't have knowledge on the framework I know I wouldn't have been able to complete it. However I found it disheartening the fact that they just checked that the app worked, didn't have any bugs but didn't even cared to ask around if I actually did it. These days I can't even imagine how easy it is to cheat with ChatGPT. Last guys I have interviewed I tell them to download a repo with a sample app and poke around with questions. I can quickly tell if someone is BSing and how deep they actually know about the language/framework. I've found this to be better than live coding or take home. On the other topic, remember that the hiring side doesn't have an incentive to tell you how well or how much you suck at coding, interviewing etc.
• mozman 3y ago
  I take this as a litmus test and refuse to interview with a company that has pedantic hiring practices.
  • givemeethekeys 3y ago
    This is the correct course of action. Your labor isn't free. A company can afford to pay you as a consultant if they want to try before they buy.
• emodendroket 3y ago
  The feedback will just be some stupid bullshit that's complete subjective opinion with no use to you in future endeavors anyway. My code is apparently both "sloppy" and "overengineered" which you'd think are kind of opposite complaints.
• scarface_74 3y ago
  The fact that roles called “senior” and “staff” are requiring take home tests, also says a lot about the meaninglessness of titles outside of the major tech companies. How much are these “senior” and “staff” jobs paying?
• davidtm 3y ago
  I think this is just symptomatic of how hiring for technical and non-technical roles alike is somewhat broken. Both companies and candidates have realised that the signal:noise ratio is against them. Companies solve for this (badly) by cranking up the funnel, but then are poorly resourced in handling that many suitable and unsuitable applicants. Candidates solve for it with recruiters, keyword-packed CVs etc. If we’re honest, hiring just sucks at the moment. Perhaps we need a better way of ensuring job specs are correctly self-discriminating between good enough and not-yet—and can drive useful feedback for all, and a better way of handling that first pass that ATS-screening so that take-homes can serve a deeper purpose and be resourced correctly.
  • devoutsalsa 3y ago
    You can weed out a bunch of people by talking about the nature of the work… “To be honest, a lot of the work is refactoring 20 year old technical debt. It’s tedious work for anyone that doesn’t enjoy that, but the work pace of the work is reasonable & we understand that it takes time to confidently make changes to our barely tested spaghetti code. If that sounds like your kind of work, we want to talk to you!”
    • davidtm 3y ago
      And wouldn’t _that_ be amazing? I think if you approach job ads with the understanding that they want as many applicants as possible then you start to look at what they _do_ say very differently.
• higeorge13 3y ago
  Take homes, whiteboards, leet codes, iq tests, and every other random assignment in the interview process do not matter if the company has unrealistic expectations and looks for a 100x engineer in them. Most of the companies fail to find anyone and keep searching forever wasting their internal resources. That’s why i really like my current company where we don’t set unrealistic expectations to candidates, we let them solve some basic coding task live and mostly talk to people. If the person can write code, a basic sql and clicks with everyone, we hire them. And our tech recruiter does wonders properly filtering cvs and recognizing fakers by just talking them. That’s probably the most important stage in the pipeline.
• mkl95 3y ago
  At least you got an assignment. On a few of my last attempts I have been rejected earlier on with little feedback. I sometimes get some generic stuff about YoE, meaning some Principal engineer at a FAANG also applied.
• andrewstuart 3y ago
  Just say no to takehome assignments. You can apologise and say "sorry but other companies have ruined it for you".
• neilv 3y ago
  Condolences. You can think of it as "bullet dodged", but that's not much consolation when it keeps happening. Take-homes are much better than Leetcode interviews, but smashing yourself with a hammer in the thumb is much better than in the face. I think some companies do an initial take-home "screen" just to filter to the candidates who are interested/desperate enough to invest in the "proof-of-work". To reduce the jerky blow-off rate, are you getting at least a solid call with a manager or engineer (not just a recruiter phone screen) as a sign of their investment, before you invest in the take-home? Balanced dynamics and mutual investment are good.
• Rapzid 3y ago
  The most bonkers I've started on was for Teleport/Gravitational. Like a 20 hour endeavor with very, very lopsided time investment. The feedback was mostly glib and seemingly from people overworked just trying to check the "I left feedback" box. Passed through two milestones but ultimately the situation soured on me so I bowed out. Check out the Glassdoor interview reviews to feel better about pretty much any other take-home haha.
• imiric 3y ago
  The mistake here is that the take home assignment isn't paid. Why do programmers accept to spend all this time on a process that might end up in a rejection? I don't mean just on take home assignments, but on the grueling in-person process that can take days or weeks as well. It's a collosal time sink with an unknown outcome. The interviewers are paid for their time spent interviewing, so it's only fair that companies respect the time of the interviewee, and pay them as well, whether they pass or not. We often forget that interviews are a two-way street. The person is interviewing the company, as much as they're interviewing them. The risk if it doesn't work out should be taken equally by both sides. If a company doesn't respect your time, it's probably a signal that they will disrespect you in other ways as well once you start working there, so it's best to move on early.
  • Groxx 3y ago
    While I largely agree with the sentiment: this kind of system is enormously open for abuse - it directly pays abusers. And being flooded by applications by abusers doesn't improve the overall state of things. It's a nice dream, but I really don't think it's feasible outside extremely niche scenarios. And those can be (and often are) quite a bit more flexible in how things are run already.
    • imiric 3y ago
      Maybe, but the interview process doesn't formally start before an initial screening. Once both parties are willing to commit to the interview, their time should be equally compensated.
• sircastor 3y ago
  I think the biggest reason we don’t get feedback on take-home work is that the company people have decided to not move forward with you, and any additional time spent on you is time not spent hiring the person they want. You’re turning in homework for a course the instructor has just kicked you out of, asking if they’ll grade it anyway. Adjacent to that, they probably don’t want to open themselves up to an argument about your work, while you try to convince them to give you another chance. That doesn’t make it any less frustrating though.
• nzoschke 3y ago
  The process I follow: 1. 30m phone screen with the hiring manager with standard interview questions and explain the process. 2a. Ask candidate for code example. If they have OSS work or personal projects we can look at that first instead of take home. Very few people take this path which is surprising. 2b. Take home GitHub exercise. Fork a repo for the person and have them read the readme and open a pull request. 3. 15m code review from hiring manager. Filter out very poor communicators or people that don’t know the language or know it at the right level. 4. Dole out PR review to a lead engineer. PR review for day to day work is extremely high priority. Fitting in a take home usually can get picked up in a day too. Easier said than done. I’m sure all candidates that are passed on are frustrated and would like more feedback. Sometimes they ask for followups with more but I push back if I think what was given is fair already. The hardest part to me as a hiring manager is that hiring is a winner-takes-all. If someone has a good submission but there are two more people in the pipeline what do I do? It’s also hard to do everything perfectly and timely for a candidate given all the other priorities going on. I hope some candidates take comfort in how the process reflects the company. If you’re unhappy with the process you get you might be unhappy working with those people. But if you’re unemployed you might be happier employed than not…
• 111111IIIIIII 3y ago
  Should be illegal
• flaminHotSpeedo 3y ago
  I will never agree to a take home assignment unless the company agrees to a debrief. A (reputable) company asked for a take home assignment after a "group interview" as a college hire, and as a college hire I didn't know to tell them to pound sand. Same experience as yours, I spent twice as long as I was told it would take, then was rejected with feedback that was generic and very subjective. Admittedly my career went in a different direction (company was realtime ads, I went down the distributed systems rabbit hole) but I still disagree with their feedback. Given the chance to do the assignment again (assuming, for the sake of argument, that I wouldn't laugh in their face) I would come up with a very different solution, but still one that I think would yield similar wishy-washy but negative feedback. Moral of this story is to never accept take home assignments, and don't get discouraged if you get poor feedback from one because it's essentially a distilled version of everything shitty about onboarding & code reviews, rolled up into a single package
• mellosouls 3y ago
  This strange take-home policy presumably originates in the presumptuous view that an interview is a one way process - the company is auditioning you only - and persists by assent of participating engineers who are happy to concede the point rather than demanding the obvious fix for the issue - payment for the suggested time. I have no idea why anybody invests hours of their time in these situations without some guaranteed return on it.
  • OwenFM 3y ago
    The expected return might still be positive, even if it's not 100% likely.
• saghm 3y ago
  Some companies can't even be bothered to respond _during_ the process, let alone with feedback after! A couple of years ago a company send me a detailed take-home project that was supposed to take about a week with an engineer assigned to answer any questions I had, and by the day before it was due, neither the engineer or the recruiter hadn't bothered to respond to a single one of my three questions I replied with over the next few days, including a basic yes-or-no clarification about whether one of the libraries they listed as okay to use included one of its optional but extremely common extensions. When I replied on final time on the thread saying that spending any more time on the project would be a waste of my time and that I was no longer interested, the recruiter finally responded a day later saying "sorry, that engineer was busy" and adding a new engineer to the thread. It was a waste of time for me, but I also realized that I probably dodged a massive bullet by not working there. An engineer not proactively telling the recruiter they won't have time due to unexpected work or a recruiter not noticing the lack of response from the engineer assigned to their candidate might be an individual failure, but both happening without anyone involved seeming to notice or care is a pretty good sign of dysfunction at the organizational level.
• austin-cheney 3y ago
  More frustrating is when you complete the assignment (all tasks) but still fail because an unspecified task was not completed. My biggest learning about software interviewing is spotting immaturity. I have it down to three points: 1) The only purpose to software is automation. It’s not data, entertainment, or anything else. If an internal team is not aggressively applying automation like static analysis or automated tests to their code they are not mature and I will not work there. 2) Does the team or employer understand the software platform they are hiring for? Software platforms are things like web browser, a game engine, terminal emulator, and so forth. I most commonly see over confidence about this when the employer is fully reliant on some framework to do everything. That is serious code smell because any deviation or problem outside the framework results in serious emotional problems. I do tire of emotional junior developers trying to define my job as some sort of infantile pacifier. 3) Can the team communicate in writing? I mean specifically the other developers. These failures are what I see in 95%+ of software employers. I am willing to take a massive pay reduction to join an employer that doesn’t fail from such immaturity.
• danpalmer 3y ago
  We had take-home tests at my previous place, and the main thing we tried to communicate throughout was respect. Evidence suggests we managed it in most cases, as we regularly had candidates thanking us for a good test after rejection, and on multiple cases I saw/heard rejected candidates encourage others to apply. How did we do it? Limited time, feedback, and benefit of the doubt. We put a time limit on the exercise. It was a 1.5-2 hour exercise, with a 3 hour cap. Some felt this added some stress, but many appreciated that it didn't take up their whole weekend or multiple evenings. In the few instances that candidates overran this massively (~8 hours) without notifying us in advance, we saw no difference in their scores. As for feedback, we were scoring against a rubric that was quite detailed across multiple different categories. This forced us as reviewers to break down and justify, not just say "I don't like it". And because we ended up with 5-10 bullet points of things we did or didn't like, there was useful feedback we could give. There was also the added benefit that we all knew the problem inside and out, and so could drill down to the essence of the solution quite easily. And lastly, the benefit of the doubt. No software engineer writes perfect code every time, and code review is an important part of the job, so if the feedback boiled down to "I don't like it but it's close", or if it was something that with regular code review would have managed to pass the bar, then that's what we'd do. We'd schedule another round to discuss the code with the candidate, see how they responded to the feedback, and hopefully move them on to the next round. Why doesn't everywhere do this? It's actually pretty hard. You need a recruiting team who are very on top of the logistics and running the process, and you need reviewers who know the problem well, are bought in to giving a great candidate experience, and who are good enough to be able to judge others. In my experience most places don't have much of this.
• Hardliner66 3y ago
  I hate take homes. I think my current company has a better approach by having new candidates do a code review of a MR we prepared. The MR is full of bugs and problems. Mixed code styles, weird commit messages, etc. And it’s not about finding every single one, but to see what the candidate is looking for to identify bad code and to see if they can review code.
• exabrial 3y ago
  Simply say, I’ll agree to do this as long as I’m provided feedback with what the wrong/right answers are, and I certainly understand that your decision is final. This will tell you a lot about the company and if you should be working there.
• pierat 3y ago
  Yeah I refuse these take-home tests. I counter with "put me in the room with one of their engineers and let's solve a real problem". I also judge them by how much skin they put in the game too. Ive done the "2-4h take home test" once. It was blatantly clear they wanted a day or 2 of free labor, with no real feedback. So, no. I'm not doing that. You want me to do a day's labor? Pay my standard rates.
• bitcharmer 3y ago
  Brevan Howard do this. Avoid them
• bjourne 3y ago
  I refuse all homework assignments as a matter of principle. Instead I link them to by github which proves beyond doubt that I'm a very strong developer. If they are not happy with that for some reason (e.g insinuating that I'm a "diva") it's not a good employer for me anyway.
• kaeruct 3y ago
  I had a terrible experience with Blinkist for this. Absolutely no feedback, just a generic rejection message
• b20000 3y ago
  i still prefer this over leetcode which requires a much larger investment also put a copyright/license on the code you submit. publish it if you don’t get the job.
• vdgio 3y ago
  I have even been waterboarded by a corpo once, on site, and given no feedback. Yes, it was close to where I lived so I didn't lose so much time or money but I would at least expect some kind of response. As for take home assignments, your mileage may vary but up until recently I was receiving feedback from most companies. As time goes by though, I see more and more providing just a generic template response, if any.
• DandyDev 3y ago
  I think take-home assignments are great, but companies using them should be willing to put in the time to properly review and give feedback. And - spoiler alert - that takes a whole lot more effort than companies like fly.io are putting in, as evidenced from the comments on here. The reason take-home assignments can work well in my opinion is that it allows the candidate to show off how they perform in _real world_ scenarios - as opposed to live coding computer science toy problems. Interviewers can assess what code looks like that resembles the code candidates would likely write on the job. What companies like fly.io are doing wrong: if you ask candidates to put in multiple hours writing code for free, the _least_ you can do is give them an interview to give the candidate feedback on their assignment, even if you're going to reject them. In case of rejection, it doesn't have to take more than 15 minutes of time from the interviewers (which is far less than the hours the candidate put in) and the candidate walks away with (1) valuable feedback that can help them improve and (2) a positive view on the company and their hiring processes. What many companies don't understand is that your goal should be for candidates you reject, to still become "promoters" of your company. Here is how we do it at Source.ag: 1. If the resume is promising, we always do a first screening interview with the candidate _before_ we even consider them for a take-home assignment 2. The candidate gets the take-home assignment after passing the interview, works on it and sends us back their solution 3. We schedule a technical interview with the candidate. This interview can basically have 3 formats: a. the assignment was bad: we tell the candidate at the beginning of the interview we don't intend to continue with them and give them some personal feedback on the assignment b. the assignment was great: we take time to ask the candidate about their solution, to elaborate on their tech choices etc. and generally use the interview to understand if their "talk" is just as good as their "walk" c. the assignment was ok-ish: we use the interview to figure out what the candidate's engineering knowledge is and to what extend it complements what we got from the assignment. It could be that a candidate didn't perform super well on the assignment, but when talking to them we discover there is enough skill, knowledge and team-fit to work with. This happens mostly for junior-medior candidates, not for seniors. This is a time investment for us as a company, but has gotten us good hiring results and a positive reputation when it comes to hiring practices.
• desio 3y ago
  It's unethical
• me_smith 3y ago
  Not a take home assessment but after I went in for a half day in-person interview at one company, I was totally ghosted by everyone, including the recruiter. They didn’t bother to send a rejection email and didn’t bother to respond to any of my emails. I used up vacation time to meet with them, I would expect some type of acknowledgement regardless of the outcome. I didn’t even care if they gave me feedback. Just give me a “yes” or “no”. The company was Splunk.
• joanne123 3y ago
  [dead]
• t312227 3y ago
  imho. those unpaid (!) take-home assignments are nothing but a BIG red flag to just avoid such companies if possible.
• Mizoguchi 3y ago
  This is expected so don't feel too bad about it and move on to the next interview. Recruiting is one of those things that is beyond broken and no one knows or cares how to fix. I interviewed for all types of companies, big and small, from Google to Amazon to small startups and local university spin offs. Overall the experience sucked, before, during and after the interviewing process. I remember at Amazon, we (candidates) being welcomed by HR staff wearing shorts at a business center in Philadelphia. Although this may not look like a big deal and in the spirit of a tech company, it really tells you about the judgment some of these people have and those who hire them. If they don't care about throwing on some minimal business-casual clothes to meet up with grown-up professionals who took the time to flight from all over the country to be there, how will you expect they will give a damn about anything else during the process? This is an extreme case for sure but I have noticed the same unprofessionalism at all levels, not only dressing codes, anything from being late for the interview, to last second changes poorly communicated to the candidates, interviewers looking at their phones or laptops while you are talking to them to even missing appointments altogether. I did have some good experiences, one small startup out of MIT labs aced the process so well that I borrowed some of their methods for interviewing myself at my current company. But in general, the recruiting/hiring process is unprofessional everywhere and I'm just glad I probably will never have to go through that manure again.
• hgsgm 3y ago
  Don't do homework. Hirers will learn to respect the marketplace.
• toldyouso2022 3y ago
  Take-home should be made illegal. It offloads the cost of hiring on the candidates.
• rickthegeek 3y ago
  If anyone is interested we created a platform to solve these exact problems. www.geektastic.com We provide take-home assessments as a service for hiring teams. We have a team who carry out reviews on candidates' code challenge submissions in their spare time (paid of course). Their focus is to provide detail to the candidate that the hiring team hasn't got time to do. Our bar to join the review team is set very high and we are assessing their ability to provide well balanced feedback. Every submission gets a detailed line by line review, with detailed explanation from our review team explaining the pros and cons of the submission. We're looking at things like code quality, solution design, problem solving skills and test coverage. We also provide the ability for the candidate to write comments on the review to try and avoid the usual one way street that happens with lots of technical assessments. I have seen these comments get a candidate a next stage interview when their initial submission was deemed not to be a 'pass' Each challenge has a set of review guidelines that aligns of team of reviewers to standardise reviews.
• logicalmonster 3y ago
  I recently had a bad experience with an interview project with CodeClimate. I put real effort into their assignment and submitted it to them. I wrongly assumed that as a technical company, they'd have a reasonably respectful process in place for developers. I can accept that my solution somehow might not have been the absolute best implementation the world has ever seen, or they decided not to proceed with me for any reason, but about a month later I got a really impersonal generic rejection message with no indication that anybody even looked at my submission and no response to my very polite and professional followup. The worst though is that some companies are allegedly (cough, Clipboard Health, cough) using job applications for free labor according to Glassdoor reviews.
• 8b16380d 3y ago
  I have family and work responsibilities that take up more time than I already have. There is no possible way I can carve out multiple hours to do an "assignment", especially one that has such a low probability of working out in my favor.
• smilekzs 3y ago
  I refuse to do takehomes as any part of the interview. My principle is out of fairness and mutual respect of the value of time: For every hour I spend interviewing, someone from the company must spend 1 hour too. EDIT: Take-home-styled coding exercise in a pair programming setup is fine --- I've taken a few of those and they were actually quite pleasant. The task is not the issue --- respect is.
• dadrian 3y ago
  If you are interviewing for a senior-ish position in some specific domain, and it has a take-home, and it recommends a time limit, and you blow past that time limit because you aren't familiar with the domain, then either: - You aren't familiar with the domain and its working as intended, you're just bad at time management. - You're not even familiar enough with the domain to know you're doing a bad job. - You learned the whole domain and it was a good use of time. In any case, slogging through a take-home you're not qualified for should warrant an introspection on your part. It should still warrant a response from the company if you submit it, and it sounds like certain companies have a ghosting problem. But it's not surprising that people who spend 10 hours on something that should take 2 hours are perhaps not coming up with good solutions and not qualified for the job they're interviewing for.
• nanciewell 3y ago
  [flagged]