5 ms·
100%. I just went through an interview process where I absolutely killed the assignment (had the best one they'd seen), had positive signal/feedback from multip
by MarcelOlsz 1y ago
100%. I just went through an interview process where I absolutely killed the assignment (had the best one they'd seen), had positive signal/feedback from multiple engineers, CEO liked me a lot etc, only to get sunk by a CTO who thought it would be cool to give me a surprise live test because of "vibe coding paranoia". 11 weeks in the process, didn't get the role. Beyond fucking stupid.
This was the demo/take-home (for https://monumental.co https://monumental.co): https://github.com/rublev/monumental https://github.com/rublev/monumental
- samiv 1y agoWait, what.. you did this as a take home for a position? Damn that looks excessive.
- MarcelOlsz 1y agoYes. I put a ton of work into it. I had about 60 pages worth of notes. On inverse kinematics, FABRIK, cyclic algorithms used in robotics, A*/RRT for real-world scenarios etc. I was super prepared. Talked to the CEO for about two hours. Took notes on all videos I can find of team members on youtube and their company. Luckily the hiring manager called me back and levelled with me, nobody kept him in the loop and he felt terrible about it. Some stupid contrived dumbed down version of this crane demo was used for the live test where I had to build some telemetry crap. Nerves took over, mind blanked. Here's the take-home assignment requirements btw: https://i.imgur.com/HGL5g8t.png https://i.imgur.com/HGL5g8t.png. Here's the live assignment requirements: [1] https://i.imgur.com/aaiy7QR.png https://i.imgur.com/aaiy7QR.png & [2] https://i.imgur.com/aaiy7QR.png https://i.imgur.com/aaiy7QR.png. At this rate I'm probably going to starve to death before I get a job. Should I write a blog post about my last 2 years of experiences? They are comically bad. This was for monumental.co - found them in the HN who's hiring threads.
- samiv 1y agoI feel bad for you, and I support you in naming and shaming this company. It's just horseshit to jerk people around like that. I hope you can at least leverage this demo. Maybe remove the identifications of it and shove it into your CV as a "hobby project"? It looks pretty good for that. Best!
- MarcelOlsz 1y agoThanks man, I'm pretty much forced to do exactly that.
- dsff3f3f3f 1y agoTheir hiring process seems absolutely absurd.
- MarcelOlsz 1y agoThey probably think they are geniuses who "weeded out another AI guy!" High fives all around! It was a great process (for me) right up until it wasn't.
- pedrosorio 1y ago> Here's the live assignment requirements: [1] https://i.imgur.com/aaiy7QR.png https://i.imgur.com/aaiy7QR.png & [2] https://i.imgur.com/aaiy7QR.png https://i.imgur.com/aaiy7QR.png. These are the same link
- suzzer99 1y ago> Nerves took over, mind blanked. This never happened to me in a job interview before I turned 40. But once I knew I was too old to look the part, and therefore and had to knock it out of the park, mind blank came roaring in. I have so much empathy now for anyone it ever happened to when I was giving the a job interview. Performing under that kind of pressure has nothing to do with actual ability to do the job.
- tracker1 1y agoDamn... that's WAY more than I'll do for an interview process assignment... I usually time box myself to an hour or two max. I think the most I did was a tic-tac-toe engine but ran out of time before I could make a UI over it.
- MarcelOlsz 1y agoI put absolutely every egg into that basket. The prospect of working in Europe (where I planned to return to eventually) working on cool robot stuff was enticing. The fucking CTO thought I vibe-coded it and dismissed me. Shout-out to the hiring manager though, he was real.
- _whiteCaps_ 1y agoThat is an insane amount of work for a job application. Were you compensated for it at all?
- MarcelOlsz 1y agoNo. Should I invoice them? I'm still livid about it. The kicker is the position pays a max of 60-120k euros, the maximum being what I made 5 years ago.
- _whiteCaps_ 1y agoProbably too late now unfortunately. The job market is brutal right now, and you have my sympathy. I hope you can find a good fit soon.
- MarcelOlsz 1y agoMuch appreciated.
- zipy124 1y agoTBF that's a pretty top tier salary for Europe.
- MarcelOlsz 1y agoRight but we both know nobody is being offered the 120 right out the gate, so it's more like 100 max.
- userbinator 1y agoThe other comments here note that, and the author even stated it directly, that it was vibe-coded.
- MarcelOlsz 1y agoWrong.
- _whiteCaps_ 1y agoA surprise live test is absolutely the wrong approach for validating whether someone's done the work. IMO the correct approach is to go through the existing code with the applicant and have them explain how it works. Someone who used AI to build it (or in the past had someone else build it for them) wouldn't be able to do a deep dive into the code.
- MarcelOlsz 1y agoWe did go into the assignment after I gently bowed out of the goofy live test. The CTO seemed uninterested & unfamiliar with it after returning from a 3 week vacation during the whole process. I waited. Was happy to run him through it all. Talked about how to extend this to a real-world scenario and all that, which I did fantastically well at.
- djmips 1y agoI feel your pain. This isn't a question about AI or not. It's about if you can do the work and do it well. This kind of nonsense happened before AI. If you can't win the game of Jeapordy you don't get the job which has nothing to do with being a Jeapordy contestant!
- johnfn 1y agoIt's funny because this repo really does seem vibe-coded. Obviously I have no reason not to believe you, but man! All those emojis in the install shell script - I've never seen anyone other than an AI do that :) Maybe you're the coder that the AI companies trained their AI on. Sorry about the job interview. That sucks.
- MarcelOlsz 1y agoI used AI for the Docker setup which I've already done before. I'm not wasting time on that. Yeah you can vibe code basic backend and frontend and whatnot, but you're not going to vibe code your way to a full inverse kinematics solution. I'm not a math/university educated guy so this was truly "from the ground up" for me despite the math being simple. I was quite proud of that.
- Tenemo 1y agoSo what was the issue the CTO had with vibe coding? Had you disclosed to then that you used LLMs for coding "basic" features outside the math and whatnot?
- MarcelOlsz 1y agoThe hiring manager told me that they were getting a lot of "signal to noise" ratio in terms of their hiring, where they'd bring someone on-site who had a good assignment and apparently more often than not, these candidates would shit the bed in a live environment. So the CTO made a live take-home assignment and didn't tell anyone. I was told that he did this to weed out the low signal-to-noise people they dealt with recently. >Had you disclosed to then that you used LLMs for coding "basic" features outside the math and whatnot? No it seems completely immaterial. I'll happily talk about it if asked but it's just another tool in the shed. Great for scaffolding but makes me want to rip my hair out more often than not. If it doesn't one-shot something simple for me it has no use because it's infuriating to use. I didn't get into programming because I liked writing English.
- postsantum 1y ago
- tayo42 1y agohow much did this job pay?
- MarcelOlsz 1y ago60k-120k euros. The upper 20k probably being entirely inaccessible so in reality probably like 70-100k euros.
- tayo42 1y agoIt's always these low pay jobs that have the sloppiest interview experiences
- MarcelOlsz 1y agoI find it's less about the salary than it is the type of company. Any startup doing anything they consider remotely "cutting edge" is going to probably be a shit show.
- achenet 1y agoIn at least parts of Europe, 70k-100k is pretty good for a mid/senior developer.
- bowsamic 1y agoIt’s the market rate in my city in Germany (not Berlin not Munich). I pivoted from non CS academia and entered software at 73k
- jonnycoder 1y agoHah I feel you there. Around 2 years ago I did a take home assignment for a hiring manager (scientist) for Merck. The part B of the assignment was to decode binary data and there were 3 challenges: easy, medium and hard. I spent around 40 hours of time and during my second interview, the manager didn't like my answer about how I would design the UI so he quickly wished me luck and ended the call. The first interview went really well. For a couple of months, I kept asking the recruiter if anyone successfully solved the coding challenge and he said nobody did except me. Out of respect, I posted the challenge and the solution on my github after waiting one year. Part 2 is the challenging part; it's mostly a problem solving thing and less of a coding problem: https://github.com/jonnycoder1/merck_coding_challenge https://github.com/jonnycoder1/merck_coding_challenge
- MarcelOlsz 1y agoThat sucks so hard man, very disrespectful. We should team up and start out own company. I tried checking out your repo but this stuff is several stops past my station lol.
- userbinator 1y agoPart 2 is the challenging part; it's mostly a problem solving thing and less of a coding problem That doesn't look too challenging for anyone who has experience in low-level programming, embedded systems, and reverse engineering. In fact for me it'd be far easier than part 1, as I've done plenty of work similar to the latter, but not the former.
- jonnycoder 1y agoYea it’s pretty easy after doing them, but it’s rare for software developers these days to do that activity on a day to day basis. It reminded me of the software crackers of the 90s and 2000s who would post cracks for windows software like autocad. It’s also relative because a $50/hr contract job isn’t exactly attracting low level FAANG engineering talent. But it’s a nice take home challenge for some second rate engineer like myself who will tackle any problem until I figure it out.
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- fooker 1y agoThis repo has enough red flags to warrant some suspicion. You have also not attempted to hide that, which is interesting.