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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 assess

by 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.
  - rusticpenn 3y ago
    In my current job, I had an onboarding phase of 1 year. Had 3 months in the previous one. Guess I am lucky.
    - psnehanshu 3y ago
      You probably work for a service based IT company where they kept you on bench.
      - rusticpenn 3y ago
        I work for product companies in R&D.
- michaelmior 3y ago
  I don't think contributing immediately and allocating time to onboarding are mutually exclusive. I think ideally a well-structured onboarding process has you contributing (in small ways) as soon as possible. It doesn't necessarily have to mean you're just thrown in the deep end.
- bhasi 3y ago
  > You probably dodged a stressful position. Word - I never considered this possibility. But now that you mention it, the hiring manager I spoke to had this smug swagger about him and a condescending sneer about my current company and open source in general. Not good vibes at all. As a member of his team, I might have placed myself in a position that is bad for my mental health. Thank you for sharing this perspective, really helped.
mchannon 3y ago
I've had this experience before. Believe it or not, I've also gotten takehomes which took multiple hours, involved some non-trivial data retrieval and management, and gotten rejected with less effort than it took them to prepare the ask. Later I had a sinking suspicion that it was not a real position, what it was was three brogrammers who found a way to get unemployed rubes to write code for them, for free, so they could deliver it themselves without having the requisite talent. Are you positive that didn't happen to you too?
- bhasi 3y ago
  That is really terrible - sorry that happened to you. The company I got the take home test from is a well known and established leader in its domain - not anything like the one you described above.
cortesoft 3y ago
At some point, it is just a numbers game. If they only have 1 position available and 5 people complete the take home test flawlessly, 4 people are going to be rejected for no good reason except that they have only one position available. As a wise man said, it is possible to make no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness, that is life.
- seriousman123 3y ago
  [dead]
- devoutsalsa 3y ago
  I don’t believe in no win scenarios.
  - somsak2 3y ago
    it's not no win. it's single winner take all
  - olddustytrail 3y ago
    Unfortunately no-win scenarios believe in you.

by bhasi 3y ago

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.
- rusticpenn 3y ago
  In my current job, I had an onboarding phase of 1 year. Had 3 months in the previous one. Guess I am lucky.
  - psnehanshu 3y ago
    You probably work for a service based IT company where they kept you on bench.
    - rusticpenn 3y ago
      I work for product companies in R&D.
michaelmior 3y ago
I don't think contributing immediately and allocating time to onboarding are mutually exclusive. I think ideally a well-structured onboarding process has you contributing (in small ways) as soon as possible. It doesn't necessarily have to mean you're just thrown in the deep end.
bhasi 3y ago
> You probably dodged a stressful position. Word - I never considered this possibility. But now that you mention it, the hiring manager I spoke to had this smug swagger about him and a condescending sneer about my current company and open source in general. Not good vibes at all. As a member of his team, I might have placed myself in a position that is bad for my mental health. Thank you for sharing this perspective, really helped.

mchannon 3y ago

I've had this experience before. Believe it or not, I've also gotten takehomes which took multiple hours, involved some non-trivial data retrieval and management, and gotten rejected with less effort than it took them to prepare the ask. Later I had a sinking suspicion that it was not a real position, what it was was three brogrammers who found a way to get unemployed rubes to write code for them, for free, so they could deliver it themselves without having the requisite talent. Are you positive that didn't happen to you too?

bhasi 3y ago
That is really terrible - sorry that happened to you. The company I got the take home test from is a well known and established leader in its domain - not anything like the one you described above.

cortesoft 3y ago

At some point, it is just a numbers game. If they only have 1 position available and 5 people complete the take home test flawlessly, 4 people are going to be rejected for no good reason except that they have only one position available. As a wise man said, it is possible to make no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness, that is life.

seriousman123 3y ago
[dead]
devoutsalsa 3y ago
I don’t believe in no win scenarios.
- somsak2 3y ago
  it's not no win. it's single winner take all
- olddustytrail 3y ago
  Unfortunately no-win scenarios believe in you.