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Ask HN: Is it now common to ask for “full” applications as part of interviewing?

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Re: Ask HN: Is it now common to ask for “full” applications as part of interviewing?

#61

Post by geofft »

WorldMaker wrote: post #53
posixplz wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if it's a coding challenge that is purposely timeboxed to 4-6 hours? At my previous job, we asked applicants to write a piece of software that would model the org chart for any given employee, enumerating their hierarchical relationships as well as their peer relationships. We may have thrown in an additional complexity or two, but we also removed a lot of requirements (no i/o or database, no user interface; we…

4-6 hours is still half to two-thirds of a business day. If I'm actively employed, I have to schedule a vacation day for that or lose precious work/life balance time. Even if I'm not actively employed at the time, I know the ancient wisdom is to spend your job search as if it were a full time job, but that isn't advice meant to mandate individual candidate employers independently force you into an unpaid, overworked…

Such a company is also selecting for the sort of candidates who have 4-6 hours free, either those who have no responsibilities at home and are willing to spend an evening or weekend on it, or those who have enough ability to take a vacation day and tell their boss "I'm going to be at home doing nothing." You basically need to do that for the in-person anyway, and there's a limit on how often you can do that.

How many candidates with small children do you think these companies are hiring?

Re: Ask HN: Is it now common to ask for “full” applications as part of interviewing?

#62

Post by geofft »

Tinyforebrain wrote: post #42

Companies use these to save time. Interviews take hours of time for multiple people. They are also soul-crushing for the interviewers to be forced to sit while watching people flounder at the whiteboard. At several companies I have been with, they had a basic 20 question skills test. It was enough to cut the number of time-wasting interviews massively. I assume that the "Full application" process is there for a simil…

If a company thinks that their time is about 20 times more valuable than my time, why would they stop thinking that once I start working there? If a company thinks that the interview process is "soul-crushing", why wouldn't they also think that of code review, mentoring employees, etc.?

Isn't it also true that one-on-ones are a bunch of time that the manager is spent with lesser coders, and it's a time-saving measure to cancel one-on-ones so the manager can write more code?

Re: Ask HN: Is it now common to ask for “full” applications as part of interviewing?

#63

Post by JosephLark »

kcorbitt wrote: post #47

My frustration with this type of interview is that their costs are entirely asymmetric. The company puts together a set of requirements once, and then forces every applicant to spend 5-10 generally unpaid hours completing it. If that were the bulk of the interview and the only further step was coming into the office for a couple of softball "culture fit" interviews it would be acceptable, but from what I've been told…

> but from what I've been told if you do great on the sample application you're just rewarded with a full day of technical interviews anyway.

Happened to me even though the recruiter roped me into the take home coding challenge by saying "We don't do whiteboard technical interviews here".

Bonus points to this company for having the second interviewer of the day so uninterested in interviewing me that he literally watched his watch near the end of the interview and bolted out the door the second he was allowed to.

Re: Ask HN: Is it now common to ask for “full” applications as part of interviewing?

#64

Post by zebraflask »

rrix2 wrote: post #21
zebraflask wrote: post #11

They want free work. Simple as that.

When the coding sample isn't integrated at all in to their stack and is a standalone toy application? Come on.

What can I tell you, it does happen. The idea is to farm out code that can be lifted from the toy app with minimal modification. In any event, even if the intent were benign, that's way too much to ask of an applicant without paying something for the time.

Re: Ask HN: Is it now common to ask for “full” applications as part of interviewing?

#65

Post by Mandatum »

vorpalhex wrote: post #15

I've stopped interviewing with companies that do this. Take home interview "challenges" take up a lot of time and resources. Most of the ones I've gotten have been prototypes/MVP type deals. + You're asking me to spend almost a week of my time, for free + I have similar examples on my Github + I'm not usually allowed to share the solution Sorry, but if you can't look at my significant github profile and figure out if…

> Would you give me your product for free for a week? (Probably not...)

This is a good response. If they won't pay for your time, ask if they'll let you hang around their offices and teams, observing, for the same amount of time you've spent coding.

Re: Ask HN: Is it now common to ask for “full” applications as part of interviewing?

#66

Post by tracker1 »

bbcbasic wrote: post #28
tracker1 wrote: post #23

I once designed a fairly simple code test as part of interviewing, requesting that the code in question be added to a public github repository. The code in question needed to be in node/javascript, read an xml file as a stream, and output a json file (newline separated json)... I then did the challenge myself, it took a couple hours. To me, it represented enough of a system that I could see how a problem was broken u…

Curious: Why do you use JS for such things? Seems like a job better suited for a workhorse like Java or C#. It would be much easier and I think C# or Java devs would find it easier by virtue of that being a typical back end app that they would have developed before.

Well, the new software was being developed in JS... the front end/back are easier to tightly couple with less disconnect when working on the system as a whole. The benefits and cons of such a system can be argued, but that was the direction that was being taken.

As to doing migration chores in JS, well, I actually would much prefer a scripted environment for such tasks... in the end it will run several times through testing, and one final time and thrown away. It's far more productive to do this in a scripted environment than to have to write a bunch of boilerplate that will just get tossed anyway.

JS specifically, as it's a very broadly supported language, the only/main language in the browser and a heavy investment for modern web applications. As stated above, leveraging a single language as far across a stack as possible has benefits. As someone who has previously had to work with 5-6 languages in 3 stacks on a daily basis before (new and ongoing projects), JS everywhere is much nicer.

Re: Ask HN: Is it now common to ask for “full” applications as part of interviewing?

#68

Post by turc1656 »

latortuga wrote: post #36

Ask an endless series of questions about algorithms and/or expect extensive whiteboard coding -> developers complain about these not reflecting the real world. Ask a developer to write some actual code to prove that they can do the job they're being hired to do -> developers complain about having to demonstrate that they can do the job they're about to be hired to do. There's a legitimate question here about how exte…

Yes! Exactly how I feel.

Re: Ask HN: Is it now common to ask for “full” applications as part of interviewing?

#69

Post by lj3 »

codys wrote: post #67
lj3 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where in the northeast? Because NYC companies are absolutely doing this right now.

MA (near Boston), NH, CT.

Good to know. I've always been interested in New Hampshire.

Re: Ask HN: Is it now common to ask for “full” applications as part of interviewing?

#70

Post by Tinyforebrain »

geofft wrote: post #62
Tinyforebrain wrote: post #42

Companies use these to save time. Interviews take hours of time for multiple people. They are also soul-crushing for the interviewers to be forced to sit while watching people flounder at the whiteboard. At several companies I have been with, they had a basic 20 question skills test. It was enough to cut the number of time-wasting interviews massively. I assume that the "Full application" process is there for a simil…

If a company thinks that their time is about 20 times more valuable than my time, why would they stop thinking that once I start working there? If a company thinks that the interview process is "soul-crushing", why wouldn't they also think that of code review, mentoring employees, etc.? Isn't it also true that one-on-ones are a bunch of time that the manager is spent with lesser coders, and it's a time-saving measure…

There is usually a few HR hours put into every interview, plus you are adding 1-6 more people at various levels of the company who might be a part of the interview. Most of the people doing the interview don't have any real training in it, and don't do it as part of their job. They may do ten full interviews to hire one person(Or more). So yes, their time is more valuable because more people and more hours are involved. The cost for hiring a person, in time and resources, is the sum of the costs of all 10 of the interviews.
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