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I hate the take homes because companies seem happy to send them out to people who have literally no chance. Sent after they already have a candidate in mind, se

I hate the take homes because companies seem happy to send them out to people who have literally no chance. Sent after they already have a candidate in mind, sent before the resume has been reviewed, sent before the company has invested even a minute talking to you. So you waste the weekend on this project when you had no chance from the beginning. And the time restrictions they list mean nothing since if you actually stop after x hours, they will just pick the person who spent the whole weekend and did a more complete job.

suzzer99 7mo ago
I got dinged on my Netflix take home 10 years ago because I used the DOM to store state instead of implementing a shadow DOM. Sure, let me just whip that right up.
- vaginaphobic 7mo ago
  [dead]
- bluefirebrand 7mo ago
  Outstanding. I've done quite a few interviews and as long as the interviewee maybe said something like "it would be better to use a shadow DOM" and could explain what a shadow DOM is, I would be pretty happy with that Expecting someone to build a full shadow DOM as part of their interview take home is excessive
  - nitwit005 7mo ago
    Often times people ding you for doing anything different than they're used to, or what they see as "the standard". The worst is when they basically ask how you'd build their product. Some people can't handle a different answer, even as they're busy hiring you to improve things.
    - tharkun__ 7mo ago
      I do think we have to distinguish two things though. It's not really bad to ask someone to do a design session with them and "build their product with them from scratch" isn't inherently bad. That's actually pretty neat if you ask me. What's bad is if there's only a single answer and that's whatever they actually built themselves, which might be a pile of thrown together startup poo that was never cleaned up. But you have the same problem with all sorts of "needless trivia" type questions. And then do you really want to work at a company, where you can't have a proper "pros and cons of different approaches" type of discussion? If you got hired, you'd have those kinds of discussions with them on an ongoing basis. Bad on the company for letting that person do the hiring but they got what they deserved so to speak. Just to make an analogy: If they simply ding you for using 4 spaces coz they use 8, that's bad. If they ask you why you use 4 spaces, they use 8, give them pros and cons and are there any other approaches and what are the pros and cons of those? That's a good interview so to speak. As an interviewer I would give bonus points if the candidate says something like "I used 4 spaces because I thought that's what you guys were probably using coz everyone's moved away from 8 spaces but secretly I love usings tabs and setting tabwidth to what I want but in reality it really really doesn't matter as long as it's consistent across the codebase as humans can get used to almost everything and this one isn't worth fighting over. Linters and formatters exist for a reason".
      - suzzer99 7mo ago
        2 spaces ftmfw. I want to see as much on the screen as possible. Horizontal scrolling is bad. Who still uses 8? Isn't that like a COBOL thing?
        fwipsy 7mo ago
        Linux kernel still uses 8 I believe. IIRC wide indentation+narrow pages were chosen partly to encourage using functions and avoiding deep nested logic. https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.10/process/coding-style.html https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.10/process/coding-style.h...
        fragmede 7mo ago
  - parpfish 7mo ago
    The inability to get feedback and course-correct is my biggest peeve with take homes. Is this one of the tests where I just need to throw together a five minute quickie to get over your “can you program” filter? or do you need me to put together something flashy and memorable to show off my ceiling? If o put together my flashy thing, would I get dinged for over-engineering something where a five minute hack solution was good enough?
  - SchemaLoad 7mo ago
    Often you don't even get to the interview step. One time I had a take home that said you could either do frontend only, backend only, or full stack. I decided to pick the backend only one and complete all of the optional backend tasks to make something pretty well made. Then they email me back and said the other candidate did the whole thing and they aren't sure if I know how to style a page now because I only completed the backend part.

suzzer99 7mo ago

I got dinged on my Netflix take home 10 years ago because I used the DOM to store state instead of implementing a shadow DOM. Sure, let me just whip that right up.

vaginaphobic 7mo ago
[dead]
bluefirebrand 7mo ago
Outstanding. I've done quite a few interviews and as long as the interviewee maybe said something like "it would be better to use a shadow DOM" and could explain what a shadow DOM is, I would be pretty happy with that Expecting someone to build a full shadow DOM as part of their interview take home is excessive
- nitwit005 7mo ago
  Often times people ding you for doing anything different than they're used to, or what they see as "the standard". The worst is when they basically ask how you'd build their product. Some people can't handle a different answer, even as they're busy hiring you to improve things.
  - tharkun__ 7mo ago
    I do think we have to distinguish two things though. It's not really bad to ask someone to do a design session with them and "build their product with them from scratch" isn't inherently bad. That's actually pretty neat if you ask me. What's bad is if there's only a single answer and that's whatever they actually built themselves, which might be a pile of thrown together startup poo that was never cleaned up. But you have the same problem with all sorts of "needless trivia" type questions. And then do you really want to work at a company, where you can't have a proper "pros and cons of different approaches" type of discussion? If you got hired, you'd have those kinds of discussions with them on an ongoing basis. Bad on the company for letting that person do the hiring but they got what they deserved so to speak. Just to make an analogy: If they simply ding you for using 4 spaces coz they use 8, that's bad. If they ask you why you use 4 spaces, they use 8, give them pros and cons and are there any other approaches and what are the pros and cons of those? That's a good interview so to speak. As an interviewer I would give bonus points if the candidate says something like "I used 4 spaces because I thought that's what you guys were probably using coz everyone's moved away from 8 spaces but secretly I love usings tabs and setting tabwidth to what I want but in reality it really really doesn't matter as long as it's consistent across the codebase as humans can get used to almost everything and this one isn't worth fighting over. Linters and formatters exist for a reason".
    - suzzer99 7mo ago
      2 spaces ftmfw. I want to see as much on the screen as possible. Horizontal scrolling is bad. Who still uses 8? Isn't that like a COBOL thing?
      - fwipsy 7mo ago
        Linux kernel still uses 8 I believe. IIRC wide indentation+narrow pages were chosen partly to encourage using functions and avoiding deep nested logic. https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.10/process/coding-style.html https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.10/process/coding-style.h...
      - fragmede 7mo ago
- parpfish 7mo ago
  The inability to get feedback and course-correct is my biggest peeve with take homes. Is this one of the tests where I just need to throw together a five minute quickie to get over your “can you program” filter? or do you need me to put together something flashy and memorable to show off my ceiling? If o put together my flashy thing, would I get dinged for over-engineering something where a five minute hack solution was good enough?
- SchemaLoad 7mo ago
  Often you don't even get to the interview step. One time I had a take home that said you could either do frontend only, backend only, or full stack. I decided to pick the backend only one and complete all of the optional backend tasks to make something pretty well made. Then they email me back and said the other candidate did the whole thing and they aren't sure if I know how to style a page now because I only completed the backend part.