I had one recently. Two nights it took me. Just a couple of questions will do. You don't have to come up with pages of shit from a committee.
The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework
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Re: The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework
#32What you want from a hiring process is to be as objective as possible. For fresh engineers, the industry has settled on basic coding right from fizz-buzz to reverse a linked list and beyond. For more senior roles, majority still rely on pedigree (previous employer, resume etc), and those who try to be more objective hand out a take-home which ends up frustrating both sides. Candidates have to spend a lot of time and…
An interesting thing happened to me when I applied for an internship with your employer. I got a call, saying that I would have an interview few days days later even gave me the exact time. Come the day of interview, I got no call. And no response to follow up emails/calls. So, when somebody from hackerrank comments on the hiring process, it is a bit vexing.
Re: The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm waiting for recruiting doctors like that. Would you want to work in a world where all programmers have to be trained, licensed and regulated with the same rigor as surgeons? Surely the fact that programming is one of the few 'white collar' jobs where someone with no education and no relevant work experience can get hired based purely on the fact that they've taught themselves the necessary skills and can do the j…
> Would you want to work in a world where all programmers have to be trained, licensed and regulated with the same rigor as surgeons? Uh, yes... There are too many terrible developers out there.
Agreed.
Re: The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework
#34I don't get it. The whole industry is complaining about not being able to hire developers, yet there seems to be some kind of competition who can come up with the most awkward hiring process. Requiring homework is a great way to deter the kind of people companies should be most interested in hiring: those who are not actively looking for a new job. I find this trend especially surprising considering that the U.S. has…
All of the complaining is just a tantrum fit of an emotionally immature industry who, just like a spoiled child has had it very easy so far.
"Why aren't there 100x more people than I actually need (because we only hire top 1%, right?) with 100 years of working experience with this technology that I just dreamt last night that want to work for free?"
Re: The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework
#35In the UK I see a lot of tests that say "don't spend more than 2 hours on this", and that I'd generally expect to take 3-5 hours tops. Americans seem to have a strange employee / employer dynamic
Re: The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm waiting for recruiting doctors like that. Would you want to work in a world where all programmers have to be trained, licensed and regulated with the same rigor as surgeons? Surely the fact that programming is one of the few 'white collar' jobs where someone with no education and no relevant work experience can get hired based purely on the fact that they've taught themselves the necessary skills and can do the j…
> Would you want to work in a world where all programmers have to be trained, licensed and regulated with the same rigor as surgeons? Uh, yes... There are too many terrible developers out there.
So you either use no commercial software at all, or you're happy paying a hundred times what you paid for it, and doing so in return for the privilege of running 1980s-era applications in 2018.
Re: The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework
#37Are there any web sites where you can read what each of the companies do for their recruiting process? At least you would know what to expect...
Glassdoor has a section on interviews. I always leave a negative one when I have put up this this crap.
Re: The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just that firing someone is legal does not mean it is easy. Especially if you have been working closely with the said person for months. And then there are people who are very nice human beings but their performance just isn't good enough. Firing them is hard and pretty bad for team morale. I'd much rather do that extra work during the hiring process than have to deal with a bad hire later.
Money where your mouth is; are you willing to pay for it? Would you pay the candidate a reasonable sum, certainly over a hundred Euros a day (after tax etc.) for their pre-interview homework? Given that the cost of a bad hire is orders of magnitude more than that, this seems like a really good deal for the company.
Absolutely. As you say, spending a few hundreds bucks is way cheaper than wasting almost half a day of the candidate and our team when we bring someone in and it ends in a no. For remote candidates it makes even more sense since we end up spending thousands of dollars in travel costs when we fly them in for onsite interviews.
Re: The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework
#39This is nuts and doesn't make sense.
Testing coding abilities should only be done in the context of finding out if I can trust the resume (which should be relatively minimal), or if the candidate is looking for their first job (again, minimal as they won't have experience).
The rest should be possible to analyse TALKING to the candidate or doing some join design session...
Good luck making people spending more than 4 hours in a selection process if you're not Google (and even so)... Seems like a great way of massively discarding anyone that's busy...
Re: The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework
#40I don't understand this development. In Germany, we've basically got full employment in the IT sector. Why would anyone waste their time with this? Just apply for the Job next door. As an employer, hiring someone new is always a leap of faith. Might work out, might not. If it doesn't, dont feel bad to fire people again.
"In Germany, we've basically got full employment in the IT sector."
I can only confirm this. I used to be a freelancer and I got almost daily offers per email and phone. In order to stop I ask them a very hi price per hour ( 90-100 euros ) and to my very surprise yesterday the guy said, "that's fine, when do we start?". I backed up a bit and after some discussion he told me that they really could not find anyone. There is really no IT people in Germany without job, so the only way to get work do is to turn to freelancers and offer a good rate.