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I want to make a lot of points about this, so many that I sort of don't know where to start. Here they are in no particular order. I feel pretty strongly that a
by ivraatiems 1y ago
I want to make a lot of points about this, so many that I sort of don't know where to start. Here they are in no particular order. I feel pretty strongly that all of these things are true at once.
1) An open-ended take-home assignment with no expected time limit and extremely little guidance is a very poor choice for an initial assessment of a candidate
2) A week of work is way too long to spend on such an assignment unless it explicitly says it expects that much time (and even then, I'd decline)
3) It doesn't seem like what OP produced in that week was terribly strong; it seems heavy on documentation and low on usable code. I see why he was passed.
4) Kagi as a company has always seemed to have an extremely fire-from-the-hip, whatever-Vlad-thinks-is-cool mentality, and I don't honestly trust it much as a result; it also seems like it therefore would not hire someone who works the way OP does.
5) Companies implicitly hire people who are similar to the ones they currently have unless they work strenuously to avoid doing so (in a personality and technical knowledge sense; this is not a comment about "DEI" or something)
6) Asking someone to put in a lot of time and effort and then providing essentially no feedback is an extremely common dick move
7) Take-home assignments should be compensated, if only some token amount, to express gratitude to the candidate for their effort. The better long-form take-home assignments do this already (Automattic is one example of a company that does this, and their other behavior aside, I think it's a good move)
All in all, nobody in this article comes off particularly well. I think OP managed to demonstrate why Kagi has this assessment while also producing an effective indictment of the assessment as a poor choice of hiring tool. Even so, I'm glad OP posted this, credit to him for showing what the hiring world is like right now. It's rough out there.