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Earlier quoted context omitted.
would you like a take-home or would you like a whiteboard session? I need to have useful information that a candidate is more than a smooth talker.
What do you get from a whiteboard/take home assignment that you can't get from a conversation where you grill them about their answers?
If you stick with it, be sure to give candidates a heads up that that's part of the process by the time they chat with the recruiter. Otherwise you're being really disrespectful of their time.
> Take-home technical assignment (~4h) or similar at candidate's choosing If I can get a similarly-paying job at a place that doesn't do this, I'll skip you. Many seniors ( actual seniors, not 3-years-of-experience seniors) have a network and can say "hey I'm looking" and instantly have multiple options that won't have them do more than talk to the team and manager for an hour or two. If that.
I think I might (for non-network referrals) respond with "my hourly rate is $XX". Has anyone done this? Has it worked? PS - I also try to add on a 30m review of /their/ code, but so far it hasn't worked. I still ask!
Edit: By the way, one company has actually paid for my time to do a take-home at my consulting rate. Most of them balk.
Everybody on HN always gets huffy and prima-donna-ish about the idea of a take home assignment. So I'll try to provide a different perspective. For some people, like me, at least in theory, I would love it, because it's much easier for me to shine than when put on the spot in an interview. I like to talk in an interview, but I'm no good at retrieving technical knowledge in real time. Unfortunately, in real life, the…
I've noticed an increasing reticence from senior programmers I know to have anything to do with DevOps. They see it as an aggravation they don't want in their lives. Somebody posted a little while back about it being easy to find consulting work in DevOps with relatively little skill, especially AWS pricing, specifically because devs at companies aren't putting in the time to learn AWS properly. Has anybody else noti…
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> The thing with 4hr technical assignments is that you're saying no to anyone with kids, which I'm going to venture applies to more senior people than juniors. Completely agree here - like a fool I recently went through an entire day's worth interviews for a role (hello Stripe recruiters!!) that required both me and my wife taking PTO, with her looking after the kids while I talked to one junior dev after another abo…
As something of a counterpoint, a literal 4-hour assignment isn't that bad--especially as an alternative to a day of interviews. If they give you the assignment and it's immediately obvious that it's actually a 20+ hour assignment, you can always just walk. When I worked for a technology analyst company, we would ask for writing samples--which most potential hires would already have. But, if someone didn't, they'd ha…
Don't forget to multiply that by however many companies they're interviewing at.
CV screened.
30 minute call with engineering manager
Tech task Technical interview where we ask questions based on the content of that exercise
Offer
Even with that we’re struggling, but we’re loathe to reduce it because the technical exercise has shown that a lot of people talk the talk but can’t walk the walk. We’re doing it in a way that’s “write an API end point for something real world-y” so no leetcode and it’s incredible how many people say they know Framework X but can’t even do this basic task.
The 4hr take-home test implies you're not after experienced "seniors", but rather those self-titled seniors with 3yrs under their belt. Four hours of focus time is A LOT for a candidate with family responsibilities and heavily restricts your recruitment pool. No parent is going to give up a precious weekend afternoon for an unpaid assignment. That plus the lack of salary range will put 95% of "good" candidates off. I…
4 hours is probably OK for a single role. However if you're interviewing at 10 different companies it adds up to a lot more.
> Take-home technical assignment (~4h) or similar at candidate's choosing If I can get a similarly-paying job at a place that doesn't do this, I'll skip you. Many seniors ( actual seniors, not 3-years-of-experience seniors) have a network and can say "hey I'm looking" and instantly have multiple options that won't have them do more than talk to the team and manager for an hour or two. If that.
> Take-home technical assignment (~4h) or similar at candidate's choosing If I can get a similarly-paying job at a place that doesn't do this, I'll skip you. Many seniors ( actual seniors, not 3-years-of-experience seniors) have a network and can say "hey I'm looking" and instantly have multiple options that won't have them do more than talk to the team and manager for an hour or two. If that.
I'm a "senior" (I was 55 when I started looking), and I didn't have a "network," because I was a manager, and wanted to get back into technical stuff (I'm very good at technical stuff, but I was paid to manage). I had a network of pretty heavy-duty people, but they all knew me as a manager, and I didn't want to put them on the spot for technical stuff, since that wasn't how they knew me. That basically meant that I h…