We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

It depends. I have so many job offer emails that I cannot reasonably answer them all. They all want to take over your life. Talk to me, then I'll schedule interviews for you at inconvenient times. What, you didn't look this random company up and memorize facts so you'll look eager? Tsk, tsk. Read these books on interviewing. Make a github account. Practice! Why don't you practice you miserable turd?! I'm just asking that you practice for a month before I'll talk to you. Drive to SOMA and take coffee! Interview at 7pm, today! Answer your emails! Do my project! Now! No, now! Right now! Don't you want this job you never heard of until I contacted you and tried to shove it down your throat? Take some time out of your day, you miserable slacker! Do my project! Now! Answer me! I've emailed you 4 times today, and left 3 voice mails! Answer me! Now! I effed up and didn't build a team, and are already 3 months behind, why aren't you doing my bidding??!! Now! Do it! How will I get rich if you don't do what I demand?! Do it!

That's my inbox. Not too appealing.

No. Now, okay, if you are doing absolutely fantastic, ground-breaking work, and I'd be rubbing elbows with industry leaders, and I am not otherwise in the market or trying to do eleventy seven other things simultaneously maybe I'll carve some time out for your project to prove myself worthy. But, you know, most jobs are jobs. If I play the interview game I can have a handful of job offers in a week (maybe not jobs I want to do, but that's a different story). Your team might be doing it right, but do I have optics into that? Probably not.

If everything I've done in my life is not enough to convince you (generic you, not draw_down you) that I can program and solve your pedestrian problem, then I don't view me as being the problem here.

So, if your take home thing is a 2 hour project, and is in lieu of a whiteboard grilling, then fine, sounds appealing to me. But only in context, because it suggests that you don't actually have any interest in measuring my skills, which go far beyond writing for loops. So, probably not a job for me, no harm, but you know, not appealing. Sell me, I'm not a supplicant. We'll figure out if we are a good match or not, no biggie.

The reality is that the take home things are usually just yet one more requirement, one more hurdle, yet more time out of my life. And you do a few, it goes into a black hole, no one even responds, or you get a one sentence email from HR telling you piss off in the nicest way possible, and the motivation to do another goes into the toilet.

Or the reverse happens. You do really well, they bring you in, throw some brain teaser programming problem on a whiteboard, your mind goes blorp, and suddenly everyone is being aggressive and scowling, or staring at their phones, instead of talking to you. Oy vey. I'm sure it happens, but I have never had take home go well, where I didn't end up feeling like a piece of meat being graded by the USDA.

And I never thought, once, "this is a really good measure of me - good performance on this reflects my on the job performance". Yes, I can write for loops, and fix bugs, but if that all the job is it must be really boring. What do you do? Why should I want to do it? How can I help? How can I grow? How can I help you grow? I have some ideas, are you interested in them? Let's build something!

Nope, just for loops, and then iterate over this structure that should be recursed over (or vice versa) on a white board.

I program. I get jobs done, every time. The code is maintainable. I try to up the bar, not maintain the status quo. I can talk to you about all of this, and if you have a medium IQ you can tell I am not bullshitting you. What more do you reasonably want?

8 weeks of contracting. Burn your vacation. Don't talk to your kids or wife, I'm trying to get rich here off your back. Work for me! Moonlight, and risk getting fired! Prove yourself worthy, because I have no judgement, and I'm terrified of making a decision! I'll string you along for months when you have all these other options.

Nah.

I like gradated questions where if someone knocks my first iteration out of the park, I have several avenues to keep probing. That usually involves bringing in more concepts, not merely making the questions more complicated per se. Fizzbuzz doesn't seem to me to have an obvious avenue for bring in more concepts. It's obvious how to make it "more complicated" but not how to expand it.

I often use CSV parsing, where I specify a function that involves a simple string and I want some natural parsing of that in your favorite language. A bonus point for starting with the observation we should use a library, then do it yourself. From there I can pivot into discussing what the correct output data structure is (especially if the rows do not all have the same size or the same data types), converting text into better types, whether or not you understand unambiguously encoding text ("how can you include a comma in your field?", and I'm not worried about whether it's a "standard" answer), UTF8 and other text encoding issues, computational complexity a bit (and while small, it's a very practical, day-to-day bit) and questions of memory efficiency, the question of streaming if the dataset is too big. I can also easily pivot into outputting this CSV file into an HTML table in your favorite language, getting into HTML template issues, security issues that can arise from that, dumping the CSV into a database, and I'm probably even forgetting some of the pivots I've done. (And the point here is that I can choose, not that I ever cover all of these in one interview.) This question template scales from intern level ("can you get this string into an array of array of strings?") to senior engineer ("alas, the text encoding is varying from field to field, now what?") quite easily.

I've phone screened with this in a shared doc, too, since I can copy & paste in the problem pretty easily.

That would violate many people's current employment contracts that either forbid them from working for someone else simultaneously, or that assert ownership of all code written outside of work.

Great attitude and a hunger to learn >> Super smart but a pain to work with, in the long run.

This is seriously one of the best comments I've read on HN in a long time. I've always had this same inclination, just never had the time to try it myself. If your current environment doesn't allow you to hire inexperienced/no-education people, you can at least work with juniors more to help elevate them (and in turn the entire team). This concept goes way beyond tech as well and can be applied to many many industries