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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, an

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.

thesnide 3y ago
Time spent on interviews is time invested. Now, it is up to you to ensure that you give an accurate filter to HR, so you can do focused investments. And interviews investment is like financial ones. You invest in multiple promising parties and expect one to outperform the others enough to make a great overall return. Long story short, hiring is your most important activity. As if you don't hire, or worse, hire badly, you won't have the firepower when you'll need it. And if you won't need the firepower, why are you interviewing candidates?
- MathMonkeyMan 3y ago
  I'm taking the "just following orders" perspective of an engineer in a large organization. I've heard that in FAANG, giving interviews was an unspoken prerequisite to promotion -- that's at least incentive to _do_ interviews. In the places where I've worked, I'm not sure there was much incentive to do interviews, and there was _no_ incentive to do them well. So, few interviews were done well. Maybe somebody further up the ownership ladder would recognize that a company is just a group of people, and hiring well makes the company. But those owners do not participate in the interviews. edit: Those owners delegate hiring to others, reasonably, but every layer of delegation changes the incentives.

thesnide 3y ago

Time spent on interviews is time invested. Now, it is up to you to ensure that you give an accurate filter to HR, so you can do focused investments. And interviews investment is like financial ones. You invest in multiple promising parties and expect one to outperform the others enough to make a great overall return. Long story short, hiring is your most important activity. As if you don't hire, or worse, hire badly, you won't have the firepower when you'll need it. And if you won't need the firepower, why are you interviewing candidates?

MathMonkeyMan 3y ago
I'm taking the "just following orders" perspective of an engineer in a large organization. I've heard that in FAANG, giving interviews was an unspoken prerequisite to promotion -- that's at least incentive to _do_ interviews. In the places where I've worked, I'm not sure there was much incentive to do interviews, and there was _no_ incentive to do them well. So, few interviews were done well. Maybe somebody further up the ownership ladder would recognize that a company is just a group of people, and hiring well makes the company. But those owners do not participate in the interviews. edit: Those owners delegate hiring to others, reasonably, but every layer of delegation changes the incentives.