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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

#131

Post by mschuster91 »

deepGem wrote: post #126
pwthornton wrote: post #98

If you're going to expect people to do real work, you need to pay them. This is common in a field like journalism. Want to do a one or two day trial of a reporter? Pay them to write for you! Have them work in a real environment and do real work for publication. If you're not willing to pay people for their time, and it's not an executive position, asking for days of a person's time is asinine. Also, if the homework i…

Exactly. Just a week or two of contract work will tell you if the candidate is a fit or not. A 30 minute phone screen will tell you if a candidate is worthy of a contract. I think companies don't do this because a. They don't want to pay and b. They don't get to gloat 'we have a super rigorous hiring process'

There is an additional difficulty in many cases: the law.

Most people are not contractors with an established company/legal status as contractors, so you want to hire them. To "hire" someone formally for a week, though, entails a lot of paperwork and has, depending on the country, legal consequences (e.g. voting rights in worker councils, minimum employment durations, right to sue for wrongful termination)...

The optimal way would be if lawmakers could create some sort of "employed contractor", however I can think of a dozen ways for employers to screw over poor people with it...

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

#132

Post by cimmanom »

animal531 wrote: post #70
i_dont_know_ wrote: post #55

Despite some of the comments here, I'm actually a fan of the 'homework' format. I'm not always great at hiring, but I know how to gauge the 'homework' interviews, and I've usually been right about the interviewee's abilities afterwards, WAY moreso than whiteboarding or riddles or any of the other alternatives. That being said, I would add some constraints: 1. The 'task' shouldn't take more than 30 min to understand,…

I'm going to disagree with you on a number of reasons. 1. A lot of studies out there show that the most important factor for a hiring success is culture, not skill. 2. Are you even measuring skill with your test? It doesn't matter if it should only take 2h for a candidate to complete your test, if they're nervous or want to impress they're going to spend 12h on it. How can you tell the difference? 3. What about the r…

I find code review-style discussion of a simple coding challenge to be great for assessing both culture fit and skill.

What we administer is like a web app equivalent to FizzBuzz in terms of difficulty level. But unlike a whiteboard FizzBuzz, it doesn't put the developer on the spot. As an extra bonus, unlike FizzBuzz, you'll get different results from the kid who just successfully finished a CS degree and the grizzled veteran who's built and maintained complex systems for decades.

The right challenge can be completed in an hour or so by a mid-level developer in a brute-force manner. It will weed out those who simply can't code (or don't grok how the web works or how apps are constructed); and also highlight candidates who are capable of more sophisticated work. If being up to speed on a specific technology from Day 1 isn't important, you can give the developer their choice of framework or language or whatever.

Then when you do a code review in person you can get a feel for both how the developer approaches code (a skill) -- but more importantly, how they take critique. Do they get defensive? Do they riff off your ideas? Do they suggest improvements/refactorings they would have made if they had more time?

You can also explore other cultural factors - for instance, how did they approach constraint trade-offs in terms of time vs. completeness vs. sophistication? How clearly are they able to communicate about technical concepts?

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

#133

Post by pluto9 »

jandrese wrote: post #119
technics256 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I don't know why you're being downvoted. This is exactly how employers abuse the H1B system.

Give an employer absolute power over an immigrant worker with no connections, support network, or other job options and their residency status on the line--what could possibly go wrong?

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

#134

Post by derwiki »

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…

> the task was to set up flask with two routes

Setting up a web server is also a different skill than backend programming -- many experienced back-end programmers have never needed to spin up a new server for their job.

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

#135

Post by falanjito »

pwthornton wrote: post #98

If you're going to expect people to do real work, you need to pay them. This is common in a field like journalism. Want to do a one or two day trial of a reporter? Pay them to write for you! Have them work in a real environment and do real work for publication. If you're not willing to pay people for their time, and it's not an executive position, asking for days of a person's time is asinine. Also, if the homework i…

“faggot 31 minutes ago | parent | on: The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpa...

If you're going to expect people to do real work, you need to pay them.”

It’s not real work, just a small proof that you’re able to do real work.

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

#136

Post by mentos »

everdev wrote: post #128

As a developer and a manger, there are many candidates who fake or bolster a resume, especially in tech. Additionally, there are some developers who are incredibly smart, but take 2-3x the time as someone who is not as senior to do the same task. The only way I've found to reliably hire is a coding test. I think it's ethically irresponsible to choose actual client work for the task. But it is important to create a te…

What about paying someone to do client work as a test? That is what I've found to be the best approach for me. It gives the candidate a very concrete understanding of the kind of work they'll be doing as opposed to a more contrived example. It comes at the cost of paying for poor work but usually some portion of it is salvageable.

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

#137

Post by j45 »

pwthornton wrote: post #98

If you're going to expect people to do real work, you need to pay them. This is common in a field like journalism. Want to do a one or two day trial of a reporter? Pay them to write for you! Have them work in a real environment and do real work for publication. If you're not willing to pay people for their time, and it's not an executive position, asking for days of a person's time is asinine. Also, if the homework i…

Contract before hire is a practice that is slowly growing, and not fast enough.

I find test paid projects are the best interview technique for detail oriented work, whether it's software or otherwise.

It's far better to select a task that is simple enough for the potential candidate to be a pinball through the code base or problem domain, ideally to solve a small problem that will be directly transferrable into the project they will work on.

I also make myself available to answer any basic questions or assumptions to save them time, because that would be the case on a normal team.

This results in a far lower expenditure of time trying out different resources to find relationships that work.

Unfortunately a lot of technical hiring is still done by non-technical people, or tech folks need to level up their hiring skills.

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

#138

Post by Bartweiss »

Epenthesis wrote: post #100
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…

I've never seen a take home coding challenge that had even the possibility of being used as production code. For me it's always been a standardized, self-contained example problem. Maybe there're scummy companies that try to push job applicants' work to production, but I'd be shocked if that was anywhere close to the modal case. So it's more like "What I need from you, Joe Electrician, is for you to go wire up this d…

I've definitely seen some prompts that looked suspiciously production-ready.

It's usually not "build out our new feature", because spinup time is a thing, but some companies do seem to throw around "build our new one-off microservice". Stuff like "given this incoming data, set up intake, a storage layer, and a backend layer that applies formula X". If the data and the formula look business-relevant, it's at least enough to raise an eyebrow.

That said, I'm not sure how much I care, provided the interview is sincere and not some kind of bizarre scam to farm out work. My main concern is much more with scale. I totally see the merit of replacing 5 hours of whiteboard interviews with 5 hours of "build a toy project at home". I don't so much appreciate "take a week of your life and build a substantial project so we don't have to do any legwork".

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

#139

Post by dmoy »

pwthornton wrote: post #98

If you're going to expect people to do real work, you need to pay them. This is common in a field like journalism. Want to do a one or two day trial of a reporter? Pay them to write for you! Have them work in a real environment and do real work for publication. If you're not willing to pay people for their time, and it's not an executive position, asking for days of a person's time is asinine. Also, if the homework i…

How do you try to hire people who currently have jobs with strict anti moonlighting policies? (Or maybe the answer is just don't bother, and you can afford shrinking the applicant pool without any big adverse effects)

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

#140

Post by theptip »

deepGem wrote: post #126
pwthornton wrote: post #98

If you're going to expect people to do real work, you need to pay them. This is common in a field like journalism. Want to do a one or two day trial of a reporter? Pay them to write for you! Have them work in a real environment and do real work for publication. If you're not willing to pay people for their time, and it's not an executive position, asking for days of a person's time is asinine. Also, if the homework i…

Exactly. Just a week or two of contract work will tell you if the candidate is a fit or not. A 30 minute phone screen will tell you if a candidate is worthy of a contract. I think companies don't do this because a. They don't want to pay and b. They don't get to gloat 'we have a super rigorous hiring process'

How many engineers would accept an offer which is conditional on "a week or two of contract work"?

Most of the engineers that I've hired came from another job (not all though), and so they need a confirmed offer before they are willing to jump ship.

So this practice introduces its own selection bias; you'd only be sampling from the pool of currently un-/fun-employed, and those who hate their current job enough to quit without a safe landing.

I'd vastly prefer to have a week or two of paid contract work from each candidate before making the decision, but it feels insulting to even ask.

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