The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework • Hacker News Board

Re: The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework

#111

Post by zero_intp » Thu, Apr 19, 2018, 2:53 PM UTC

threatofrain wrote: post #69

cornholio wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Developers have a similar attitude, despite currently being one of the most privileged segments of the workforce save perhaps investment bankers. We have a straightforward professional path that does not require massive debt and burning half of our youth doing academic busywork and entry level drudgery - like it happens in almost any other professional field with similar compensation. The industry requirement to prov…

I might assert that what developers have is not a privilege. A privilege is something granted out of generosity or grace by another party, perhaps even undue (and hence the grace). What developers have is some "game", which makes them a "player". As soon as they lose their game, they cease to be players. Their relation to the game is exactly their value and nothing less. Tech employers are higher level players who kn…

Very well thought out rebuttal. I live in the convergence between telecom/network engineering and code, and I definitely see the disparity that you describe.

Re: The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework

#112

Post by reefoctopus » Thu, Apr 19, 2018, 2:54 PM UTC

I had this happen recently. Not only did they want me to do unpaid work as part of the interview, but that work was directly related to their business. They requested that I do this before they had even spoken to me. I responded that I was unwilling to do it in exchange for a chance at an interview. I was an excellent candidate, and I’d done years of work on similar systems that I could point to. This sort of thing is a huge red flag that the employer doesn’t respect the time of those who work for them.

Re: The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework

#113

Post by JustSomeNobody » Thu, Apr 19, 2018, 2:54 PM UTC

mieseratte wrote: post #87

dilap wrote: post #82

I worked for a company that did a 3-day, challenging take-home problem. It was a big ask, but it was amazing for getting a sense of people's problem solving and coding abilities. (The final result would only be 1000 lines of code or so, but 3 days provided time to think and experiment with different approaches.) Maybe paying people for the time if you end up saying "no" is a nice compromise? If you are potentially se…

I've met folks, recruiters and (tech) leadership, at companies that do these type of long, arduous interview processes. They make it a point of ego / pride that they have such a long, arduous process. They've even mentioned the occasional candidate who asks about billable hours for an 8+ hour code problem, saying "Who the hell does that guy think he is?" Of course, they were shocked and appalled when I asked who they…

So, basically, they only wanted candidates who would willingly work in a sweatshop.

Re: The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework

#114

Post by commandlinefan » Thu, Apr 19, 2018, 2:54 PM UTC

dagw wrote: post #13

pleasecalllater wrote: post #11

I'm waiting for recruiting doctors like that. Oh, you are a surgeon with 17 years of experience? Cool. How about you make a surgery at home, record it, and send us a video? More pathetic are only companies which have only one question at the beginning (without any further contact) "how much do you want to earn" and after that there is no negotiation. Sometimes I feel like I'm drowning in an endless sea of candidates.…

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…

> where all programmers have to be trained, licensed and regulated with the same rigor as surgeons?

Yes. Please, God, yes.

Re: The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework

#115

Post by nkrisc » Thu, Apr 19, 2018, 2:56 PM UTC

zero_intp wrote: post #105

0x445442 wrote: post #85

If the software development industry was the home building industry... I'm a general contractor (Unicorn Homes Inc.) and I'm currently building a number of spec homes. We're going to need electrical work done in all the homes and I'm in the process of sub-contracting out that work. What I need from you, Joe Electrician, is for you to go wire the kitchen of one of these homes. Once you're done I will inspect your work…

For contractors in properties I own I do this, but the initial work is paid.

Which makes perfect sense and isn't controversial. You're simply hiring them for a small job to evaluate their performance before you hire them on for a much bigger job. It happens all the time and is normal.

Re: The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework

#116

Post by vanadium » Thu, Apr 19, 2018, 2:56 PM UTC

jschwartzi wrote: post #86

dilap wrote: post #82

I worked for a company that did a 3-day, challenging take-home problem. It was a big ask, but it was amazing for getting a sense of people's problem solving and coding abilities. (The final result would only be 1000 lines of code or so, but 3 days provided time to think and experiment with different approaches.) Maybe paying people for the time if you end up saying "no" is a nice compromise? If you are potentially se…

This heavily biases your interview process to only take candidates with time to complete your homework: unmarried, childless new graduates. If you tried to give me a 3-day interview I would walk away.

It also weeds out, disproportionately, those who have major obligations to family and other things outside of work I have no business asking about, regardless of marital status or children.

Guess which socioeconomic groups it tends to disadvantage most?

As a hiring manager (Director), I've long maintained the entire hiring process in tech is broken, and this movement toward requiring an arduous amount of unpaid personal time on "homework" is tantamount to abuse. Respect is a two-way street in the hiring process, and it starts with me showing them that respect for their time and obligations.

Re: The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework

#117

Post by dsr_ » Thu, Apr 19, 2018, 2:56 PM UTC

always_good wrote: post #74

danielh wrote: post #17

I 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…

I wonder how much of the shortage is due to there only being a relatively small portion of jobs that developers actually want. Every time I've worked at a small company that had obvious perks (using a cool language, building a cool product), we had a bunch of applicants to pick from. We could be picky. But the few times I worked at a company on soul-sucking work like internal legacy tools in VBScript for a non-tech c…

I never see a shortage of people applying. I usually see a great shortage of people I want to hire.

Mid-level position, asking for 5 years of related experience? 85% of the resumes have no related experience. Fresh out of school, that is. The virtual pile gets much shorter when minimal criteria are applied.

Re: The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework

#118

Post by cimmanom » Thu, Apr 19, 2018, 3:00 PM UTC

some_account wrote: post #89

I prefer homework to timed, monitored programming sessions. But the task should never be a big task. When i interviewed for a backend development position, the task was to set up flask with two routes, connect to a dB and retrieve a couple of rows when user visited the routes. It was not hard even though I never worked with flask before, and it wasn't supposed to be hard either. It was a test if I had basic programmi…

Exactly - a take-home test that will take more than ~2 (maybe 3) hours to complete is unreasonable. And it should be administered only after a preliminary phone screen.

I'm willing to give up an evening for a job that appeals to me and that I have a decent chance at landing. I'm not willing to give up all my weekday free time for a week or stay up until 3am. And I won't do either if you're not willing to first invest 15 minutes to make sure there's sufficient mutual interest to be worth my investment of hours.

If you don't respect my time before hiring, I assume you won't respect it after either.

Re: The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework

#119

Post by jandrese » Thu, Apr 19, 2018, 3:00 PM UTC

technics256 wrote: post #80

cooervo wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also from Germany. Last time someone told me "we just can't get enought decent devs" was a company with the worst hiring process I have ever seen. They wanted me to build an app, with backend and frontend, and design (the design had to be "beautiful"), test it, all in under a weekend while I still was working fulltime at some other job, and I told them, they knew. It was a Deutsch company. The name is GuteFr e.The wo…

Lol as an American living in Germany I totally empathize with you, it made me smile. Germany also says it suffers from a lack of developers, but in my opinion what they don't say is that they need more developers to treat poorly and with a low salary.

That's the same in America. You see job posting like:

Developer position, independent contractor, 5+ years experience Erlang, COBOL, Salesforce, Active Directory, IBM Mainframe, and Java required. Starting salary: $40,000.

And they're whining that there is a great developer shortage in America but they did get some offers from overseas that claim to have those skills, if they could only get a H1B...

Re: The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework

#120

Post by weego » Thu, Apr 19, 2018, 3:00 PM UTC

jschwartzi wrote: post #86

dilap wrote: post #82

I worked for a company that did a 3-day, challenging take-home problem. It was a big ask, but it was amazing for getting a sense of people's problem solving and coding abilities. (The final result would only be 1000 lines of code or so, but 3 days provided time to think and experiment with different approaches.) Maybe paying people for the time if you end up saying "no" is a nice compromise? If you are potentially se…

This heavily biases your interview process to only take candidates with time to complete your homework: unmarried, childless new graduates. If you tried to give me a 3-day interview I would walk away.

I've ended up having a bit of a row in an interview over this kind of thing because people just bias their tests to expectations they don't even have of their current staff. 1000 lines of decent code in 3 days is a rare thing at the best of times.

"we'd like you to just whiteboard some pseudo code for this problem that one of our senior engineers solved recently"

"was he stood in front of multiple people, timed and drawing on a whiteboard when he solved it?"

"no, but we're just wanting to see how you'd approach the problem"

"well, I'd probably do what he did which is Google some stuff, read some stuff, have time to process it, then write some code and then probably restart as I figure out the direction I want, probably bounce an idea off a colleague or two to make sure I'm not just in crazy tunnel vision land and then I might have the makings of a solution. Shall I whiteboard that flow diagram for you?"

interview ended abruptly at that point