Don’t Get Attached, It’s Just Luck. My Interviewing Advice and Tips

I'm assuming you're referring to an un-timed homework assignment. Timed homework assignments are absolutely the devil and I don't think I'd do one of these.

My biggest issue with (un-timed) take home assignment is that often, as a candidate, this ends up with me investing a nontrivial amount of time, only to not hear anything back. If I'm going to spend multiple hours on something, I would kind of like something in return, such as feedback on my work. Very, very few companies will give any feedback since they don't want to be sued and/or have the candidate try to rebut the reasons why they were turned down.

Yeah, it's untimed in the sense that we don't specify an elapsed time it must be done in. People have different things going on in their lives, and you can't just assume they can drop everything for your test. We specify a suggested amount of time so that people know not to spend too much time on it.

On the feedback point: this is a perfectly reasonable stance. Perhaps I should give better feedback to our candidates.

Part of my concern is that I've seen candidates show me emails from their recruiters that have attached all the detailed feedback I've give to their previous candidates.

The other thing is that at some points in the hiring, you're really competing against the others in the pipeline, so you might have actually performed very well, just not quite as well as one of the others. I have also seen one candidate fail based on multiple independent personal disrecommendations rather than on performing badly in the test.

I have noticed in previous interview processes that a lot of people think they failed for a reason other than the reason they actually did fail.

I do think it'd be more fair for me to give better and more detailed feedback, but there are a lot of pitfalls with the most obvious version of that. Perhaps there's room for a bit of disruption with a good solution to this problem.

actually trying an unproductive technique is what is wrong. You need to be full time and using a productive technique, so I do agree that just sending out CVs 24 hours a day is wrong

Triplebyte does a fair job on the feedback front. I've been through their process recently, and found it to be more useful for me than any other company's process (I chose the coding project over the standard process). I dislike that they still put candidates on the spot by writing code literally in front of them[0], but the feedback I got from them was actually useful.

I think your issue with candidates showing you emails from their recruiters is actually an issue with recruiters more than your process. Recruiters will do just about anything they can to make the placement.

If you're in a situation where a candidate excels on the test but gets passed over in favor of someone who did even better, then, good for you. :) "We decided to go with another candidate at this time, but here's a little feedback on your coding project," would go a long way with me. If you're really feeling generous, a referral into another company would be a great thing.

Someone who fails because of personal disrecommendations, you can just give them a generic "We reviewed your coding project and here's what we thought of it... but we decided to go in a different direction. Best of luck on your search." (I'm assuming these people fail because they're assholes, not because they're incompetent, right?)

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[0]: Seriously, guys, if you're reading this... I chose the project interview because I fall apart when being put on the spot, and I told you that. I don't have someone watching over my shoulder at work... and it's a good thing, too, otherwise I'd end up having anxiety attacks.

I've been coding since I was 14 (I'm 27 now) and went to uni; I usually never have a problem with technical interviews, but I applied for Facebook just to try out their interview process (because one of my academic-minded software engineering friends told me that he didn't pass the third interview - So I was intrigued).

I thought that their questions were mostly good but the interviewer makes you code live in realtime - I found this really stressful and I froze several times.

I remember one of the challenges they posed in one of the interviews was to flatten a JSON multidimensional array that had an arbitrary level of nesting. I implemented the recursive solution without any problem (which is the difficult part right?) but then the interviewer asked me to come up with a non-recursive solution - This is actually easier, but because I was under stress and was still thinking about the problem in recursive terms, I just froze.

I even asked "Do I need to use a fringe list?" (referring to a structure used in several search algorithms) but I don't think the interviewer understood my question and they weren't able to give me any guidance for what they were specifically looking for so I just asked to skip that question because of time pressure.

Then later they asked some really easy questions about HTML and CSS (which I've done thousands of time) but because of the IDE they made me use, I couldn't actually run the code to test (and under stress, I forgot the exact syntax for a few things).

I guess this is an interview process you need to really prepare for.

I suppose the process makes sense for FB; the feeling of 'being watched' which I felt in the interview is probably common while working there day-to-day (considering the open workspace environment) - They need engineers who can perform in such an environment. I'm definitely not one of them.