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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

#141

Post by threatofrain »

scott_s wrote: post #129
threatofrain wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"Privilege" is not generally understood to be granted out of generosity or grace. The dictionary definition is "a right, immunity, or benefit enjoyed only by a person beyond the advantages of most" ( http://www.dictionary.com/browse/privilege ) which sounds like it applies to software developers when compared to the rest of the workforce. One can enjoy a privilege even if it wasn't intentionally granted by another pa…

I thought of undue grace or generosity because typically the term is used to criticize the unmeritorious for undue position -- is it not?

What does it mean if I say you are privileged? When one looks further at the definitions listed for privilege, one sees examples discussing kings and royalty for birthrights. If we're discussing whether people are unworthy, then we are on the same page.

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

#142

Post by matthewmacleod »

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'

Companies don't do this because it will wildly cut down their candidate pool.

There is _literally no chance_ that I am going to leave an existing job for a "week or two" contract with a company. If that's part of their hiring process, I will simply look elsewhere.

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

#143

Post by cornholio »

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…

>A privilege is something granted out of generosity or grace by another party, perhaps even undue (and hence the grace).

That's quite a narrow definition. A privilege is any kind of advantage enjoyed by virtue of belonging to a group as opposed to personal merit. It's not fundamentally imoral and may well be temporary. Certainly no one has to grant someone the privilege of beauty or intelligence.

In relation to other professions , programmers have the strong privilege of being highly in demand in the labour market. This is clearly a temporary situation, and they should absolutely make the most of their "game" towards the tech employers.

What I was underlining is that the tech job market is ballanced, and certainly more favorable towards labour than almost any other.

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

#144

Post by iandanforth »

I'll take a 3-day take-home project over a whiteboard interview or live coding session any day. Working at my pace with my tools in my space? Yes please.

The article makes two good points re: bias and lack of research. To the first I think it's up to us as interviewees to mention this in all of our calls. "Do you have a non-take-home option? For some groups this could be an exceptional burden."

To the second there's no real answer other than a lot of companies need to try it out to see how they fare and then when they have a basic idea of logistics that work run a study on efficacy / predictive power.

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

#145

Post by Bartweiss »

conover wrote: post #123
Epenthesis wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 agree with this sentiment. We offer candidates a choice of initial step before an onsite interview: - A short phone interview using a collaborative editing tool like CoderPad. - An example project they can complete independently and turn in. We've designed this project to take about 2 hours to complete. Almost universally, candidates choose the "take home" project option.

> We've designed this project to take about 2 hours to complete.

Then you've got it right.

It's good to see people admit whiteboard interviews are a crummy system, I think you can learn way more from X hours of "do a task on a real computer with the internet" than you can from the same X hours of "do algorithms work on a whiteboard".

The objection, for me at least, is to "do 10*X hours of work on a real computer". It's bizarrely common to massively scale up the time investment when moving to this sort of task. And the answer is so easy - just don't do that!

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

#146

Post by wtvanhest »

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'

I personally would never, ever accept a week or two of contract work.

Companies dont do a week or two of contract work because people that have strong experience will just say no.

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

#147

Post by jandrese »

pluto9 wrote: post #133
jandrese wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

To be fair, such an employer usually can't get a H1B these days. Which is probably for the best because those people were probably not completely truthful when they described their tech experience.

There is also an filtering effect on job sites where good jobs get snapped up right away and disappear from the site, while delusional prospects concentrate over time, causing people to think that those sites have nothing but garbage offers.

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

#148

Post by theptip »

mschuster91 wrote: post #131
deepGem wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 opt…

Perhaps this is different outside the US, but this is not really a big problem inside the US from my experience. If you're doing "contract-to-hire" you do need to be somewhat careful that you don't treat them as employees before they are, e.g. don't give them equipment (laptop etc), don't require them to arrive at a certain time, probably don't buy them lunch, etc. IANAL (this is not legal advice), but it seems quite easy to keep a software engineer correctly classified.

It's not like the job "Uber driver" where the fundamental nature of the job means you can't be a contractor.

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

#149

Post by apetresc »

derwiki wrote: post #134
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.

I'm very comfortable with never hiring a backend programmer for whom this is an insurmountable obstacle.

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

#150

Post by bluGill »

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…

Not just ethically irresponsible, it is probably illegal. Unpaid work that a company has someone do must be of no value to the company.

It would be legal (though the ethics are still questionable) to give someone work after the client has decided not to give you a contract, as then there is no value in doing that work.

This is why most big companies prefer to to hire contractors. You get someone for 6 months, if you like them you hire them, if you don't you let the contract expire.

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