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

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

#331

Post by throwaway84742 » Thu, Apr 19, 2018, 5:22 PM UTC

monocasa wrote: post #250

speby wrote: post #218

Our industry's hiring practices are absolutely obnoxious. In an ideal world, you could trust someone's resume. e.g. "I've written large production programs in C." Ok, great, so then clearly this person knows C so there should be no need to dissect code or run them thru some linked list algorithm and see if they know how to use pointers correctly. Yet, we do. Ok, then what about open source contributions (if they have…

I used to hate it, but have now performed enough interviews of supposedly senior devs with decades of experience. I've literally seen someone who did firmware for the space shuttle grind for 45 minutes on fizz buzz without making progress. Like, I'd they struggle for ten minutes or so, I take a step back and say "Ok, screw syntax, let's just vaguely talk about what needs to happen and mock up some pseudo code.". Even…

That sounds to me like fight or flight response. Happens to me sometimes, and when it does I can’t code worth a damn, in spite of having a decade and a half of experience on the top projects at some of the top companies in the industry. This, in fact, happened to me the first time I interviewed with Google: I bombed that pretty spectacularly. The second time I applied I already had a couple of very generous offers elsewhere, so I didn’t care as much and was less nervous during my interviews, so I passed.

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

#332

Post by mnm1 » Thu, Apr 19, 2018, 5:22 PM UTC

newobj wrote: post #301

It's unreal that will people will bitch and moan about having to invest a couple days, maybe even a whole week in cramming/prepping/interviewing, to perform on-demand, one time, for a job that realistically will earn them $100k, $200k, $300k, $400k+ a year. Meanwhile people that work harder than us 5 days a week for the entire duration of their career will make 1/2, 1/4, 1/6th, or less of income, with none of the per…

After you've been burned by these tests once or twice, you realize only the dumbest of the dumb would even consider taking such tests. Employers are so disrespectful, most times they won't even look at your submission. Buckets of money my ass. This is free work that often doesn't even get you an in-person interview. Companies that use these tests are really optimizing for the worst engineers, the most desperate, and the ones with the least common business sense and respect for their own time. If these companies could at least be trusted to even consider all submissions, maybe then it might be worth it, but having to do dozens of these tests just to get a regular interview (because no hiring process hires simply off one of these tests) is beyond ridiculous. If a company wants actual work done, they should pay for it. That's the only way to make sure the exchange is fair considering how untrustworthy and uncaring companies are these days. Writing code for a few hours or a few days just to find out the company's not even interested in reading it, is absolutely the stupidest thing I've ever done in my career, a career that has not been a stranger to stupid things at all. In the future, I will use the idea of this type of test to weed out all the people who do not have enough self respect to say no. That's the only proper use of this type of testing.

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

#333

Post by monksy » Thu, Apr 19, 2018, 5:22 PM UTC

Things I've had to do lately for the "homework":

- Write a game engine

- Answer 5 programming problems in the span of 2h20m

- Do 3 coding exercises over the span of 12 hours. (That was pretty brutal .. as that you have to build everything up yourself)

- Write a REST service and business logic

- Write a rules engine with depending rules and type.

Worst part of all of this:

When you're getting evaluated you're up for being nitpicked over spelling mistakes in the documentation.

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

#334

Post by lkrubner » Thu, Apr 19, 2018, 5:23 PM UTC

ModernMech wrote: post #268

waylandsmithers wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who does a lot of interviewing, I tone down the technical stuff as the experience and responsibility level increases. I think a lot of the annoyances you mention still make sense for an entry level position, because there are a lot of folks who actually can't write code who apply for those jobs. For candidates with many years of experience, obviously they can and have been writing software effectively, so…

I have a PhD in Computer Science and 10 years in the industry, and I've never not been asked to do some trivial programming task in an interview. Thanks for showing some common sense, but most interviewers are just lazy. One time I couldn't implement a skiplist, and the feedback I got was "we were concerned about your problem solving skills".

Even recently, I've gone to job interview type situations and the interviewer has literally asked me "Do you understand what Object Oriented Programming is? Can you write good quality Object Oriented code?"

This despite that my best known essay is titled "Object Oriented Programming Is An Expensive Disaster Which Must End" a fact the interviewer should know if they'd looked at my resume or spent 10 seconds looking up my name on Google. Wikipedia now lists me as one of the critics of OOP -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_programming

I'm lucky in that my position is comfortable, so I can laugh off stuff like that, and either educate the person I'm talking to, or end things quickly by explaining that there is probably some kind of cultural mismatch.

But it shows a remarkable laziness on the part of the people who, in theory, want to learn more about me.

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

#335

Post by CodeMage » Thu, Apr 19, 2018, 5:23 PM UTC

majormajor wrote: post #252

nugget wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me play devil's advocate for a second. Knowing how to write code isn't binary, of course; there's a wide range of skill even among those who have contributed to large production systems. If I hire someone who seems great on paper and turns out to be a dud, then I immediately let them go. It's bad for me, and bad for them. If a 10 hour project-specific coding task reduces mis-hires by 50%+, isn't it better for bot…

> If a 10 hour project-specific coding task reduces mis-hires by 50%+, isn't it better for both parties? Does this fully replace the onsite? If I'm fully employed, interviewing with three or four places, and expected to take a day off and visit each of them, adding another full day of work on top of each is a big hurdle. To keep going with the devil's advocate: If one of your competitors says "ok based on your initia…

I cannot agree enough. I'm okay with most of the interviewing practices out there, but there has to be some kind of balance between the company's needs and mine.

One of the most mind-boggling interviewing processes I've been through went like this:

1. Write a program that satisfies the given requirements. Be sure to use the specified design pattern they explicitly requested. Include a suite of unit tests and instructions for building and running the program. Do this within one week.

2. Phone call with the team to discuss your program. Explain why you did certain things in a certain way. Discuss the design patterns you used, especially the one they requested.

3. A "coffee meeting" with some of the team members to discuss the cultural fit. They described their culture and the environment, and also talked about what I looked for in a job, my motivations and what I would do in certain hypothetical situations.

4. Full day of on-site interviews.

The reason I call it mind-boggling is because this process wasn't outlined beforehand, so that last step came as a total surprise; at that point, I had assumed they had enough information to decide. When I explained that I couldn't accommodate them within a week at least due to my current job, their proposed solution was to instead do two half-day interview rounds after normal working hours. This is where I decided to politely drop them, not so much because they wanted to make me go through an interview loop after a full day's work, but because they were going to make their employees do that, too. I was already concerned about the adversarial nature of their work culture -- anyone can nominate anyone else to be fired because "they don't belong there" -- and this just convinced me that I wouldn't fit in there.

The moral of the story is: your interview practices send a very strong message about your company. Be careful what that message is.

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

#336

Post by speby » Thu, Apr 19, 2018, 5:23 PM UTC

ams6110 wrote: post #270

speby wrote: post #218

Our industry's hiring practices are absolutely obnoxious. In an ideal world, you could trust someone's resume. e.g. "I've written large production programs in C." Ok, great, so then clearly this person knows C so there should be no need to dissect code or run them thru some linked list algorithm and see if they know how to use pointers correctly. Yet, we do. Ok, then what about open source contributions (if they have…

> we don't really have a way to de-facto verify that the person can do what they say they can do We do, it's called the probationary period. 30 or 60 days, or even a bit more. If the person isn't working out, or is not a good "fit" you can say goodbye. And it goes both ways. Candidates might find that the actual work or work environment is not what was portrayed in the recruitment process. If they don't like your com…

Of course I don't disagree. So true. I meant in the context of the interview / hiring process, short of hiring them on and thinking about it through the lens of a probationary period.

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

#337

Post by TheGRS » Thu, Apr 19, 2018, 5:24 PM UTC

Clubber wrote: post #312

TheGRS wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm rethinking what I did on my last hiring position. I sent a take-home test that should take about 2-3 hours to those who sent in a decent resume. It filtered out a little over half of the applicants I responded to, as in half didn't respond. It further filtered out a small segment who didn't do very well on the test. A filter is definitely needed to weed out those who are simply casting a wide net, are looking for…

>as in half didn't respond Wouldn't it be funny if the half that didn't respond were the best candidates you heard from, and you threw them away with your take home thing? It's the irony that the thing you did to make sure you got good applicants was the very same thing that turned the best away.

For sure, its something I've thought about too, but at the end of the day you need to do something to get from the many down to the one. Gut intuition gets used at some level and I prefer that to be way down the line after we've gathered a lot of data about a candidate. Take home tests also serve as a standardization measurement. Everyone does the same test so we can at least compare candidates to each other on that level. If they don't do the test then its pretty tough to compare them.

At some point you need to ask the applicant to do something to prove their worth and interest in the company. Take home tests are only one filter for that and I'm honestly open to others.

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

#338

Post by newobj » Thu, Apr 19, 2018, 5:24 PM UTC

mywittyname wrote: post #328

newobj wrote: post #301

It's unreal that will people will bitch and moan about having to invest a couple days, maybe even a whole week in cramming/prepping/interviewing, to perform on-demand, one time, for a job that realistically will earn them $100k, $200k, $300k, $400k+ a year. Meanwhile people that work harder than us 5 days a week for the entire duration of their career will make 1/2, 1/4, 1/6th, or less of income, with none of the per…

Personally, I think it's fine to expect employers to verify a candidates skills. But they should also limit their verification to the minimum amount necessary. People are just arguing where that line should be drawn. Whether it's hours, days, or months of verification. Some careers do require months of unpaid internships in order to get jobs. And it's not because it takes months to verify a person's ability, but beca…

It's wrong if the company benefits in any way from your interview/probationary period. (Probationary periods are just wrong period IMHO.) Interviewing is a huge burden to most companies, so if your interview questions are entirely synthetic, it's ONLY a cost to the company to interview you, which they should naturally want to minimize on their own. But you know what's even more expensive than interviewing? Dealing with bad hires. So I think a company is within its rights to do it what takes to ensure a quality hire. But they should not gain any benefit from this process - doing so is crossing a line - other than potentially being able to hire you, or failing that, at least make a good impression on you.

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

#339

Post by monksy » Thu, Apr 19, 2018, 5:24 PM UTC

speby wrote: post #218

Our industry's hiring practices are absolutely obnoxious. In an ideal world, you could trust someone's resume. e.g. "I've written large production programs in C." Ok, great, so then clearly this person knows C so there should be no need to dissect code or run them thru some linked list algorithm and see if they know how to use pointers correctly. Yet, we do. Ok, then what about open source contributions (if they have…

I'm not sure its just the recruiting side. We're seeing some concerning positions in the market:

1. Expectation of long work hours (Frequent and short deadlines due to agile)

2. Micromanagment being the standard (agile)

3. Terrible environments (open desk/office)

4. Removal of vacation time (unlimited PTO means you have no vacation days)

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

#340

Post by dsr_ » Thu, Apr 19, 2018, 5:25 PM UTC

smokinn wrote: post #176

dsr_ wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When you say you require 5 years of related experience as a minimum bar, most applicants read we don't train or invest in our employees. It's not surprising you don't get the best candidates applying.

If I want a junior person, I place an ad for a junior person. We do quite well with those.

If I want somebody with 5 years of experience, it's because I need someone who has already got familiarity with the tools and can apply good judgement.

I have had both positions open simultaneously on occasion, and discovered the same people applying for both. Some of them were even qualified for the junior position.