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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

#431

Post by jasonvm »

I was recently on the job market and decided to apply to TripleByte as a way to hopefully skip some of the annoyances. The process involves a short online quiz, and then a 2-hour live-coding session with one of their engineers. It's supposed to demonstrate to potential employers that this candidate is actually skilled at coding.

The problem were the employers, who just treated TripleByte approval as an add-on, instead of a substitute.

One employer said I'd also have to do a take-home assignment (which was, I kid you not, recreate React) and then a 4-5 hour onsite. A few weeks later, that employer contacted me to see if I had completed the assignment. I told him I accepted another job. (Of course I didn't even bother starting the assignment)

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

#432

Post by 0xdeadbeefbabe »

aje403 wrote: post #386
trowawee wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know several really, really good programmers with pretty intense anxiety. Automatically ruling them out because of a poorly-formatted interview process would be a big mistake.

So basically hire the guy who, if you tap on his cubicle, will have a heart attack and sue your company? If you hire a pretty girl too, does he forget how to speak english? Why not just hire someone who doesn't have panic attacks too bad to code fizz buzz instead?

Does it bother you that you don't know the answer?

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

#433

Post by throwaway84742 »

TheGRS wrote: post #364
throwaway84742 wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 el…

Hence the take home interview. At least at the last company I worked at we began doing these because we could tell that the stress was filtering out some otherwise decent candidates. At least that was one of the reasons, it also gave us a chance to talk about technical solutions the candidate produced in a more stress-free way.

Yeah, I’d vastly prefer that, but it should take no more than a couple of hours, not days. In fact we use a 1-hour take home to screen candidates, with great results. The assignment is pretty simple, but you can’t find a solution on the internet. We have found this to be way more effective than a phone screen (which we also do, to let the candidate also ask questions early on).

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

#434

Post by monocasa »

psyc wrote: post #388
monocasa wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Perhaps it's because you insist on testing their ability to live code on the spot as a performance piece, and misinterpreting that as testing their ability to code. If you're turning down someone who wrote space shuttle firmware, because they "can't do fizzbuzz", then you are administering a terrible test and getting a false negative. I have 20 years of industry experience. Everything on my resume is the truth. I've…

> If you're turning down someone who wrote space shuttle firmware, because they "can't do fizzbuzz", then you are administering a terrible test and getting a false negative.

Or... large companies, particularly defense, excel at hiding mediocrity in their ranks, and it's easy for someone who produces no or negative work to be handed around rather than fired.

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

#435

Post by pdonis »

tboyd47 wrote: post #384
adreamingsoul wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check your premise. It sounds to me that an assumption is being made because they didnt meet the expectations within a fixed time period. The danger with this is that this is not a real world scenerio of how two people would approach a task or problem. It’s also important to recognize that everyone is different with regards to how they process information. Stress has a real biological effect on how the brain processe…

Solving a problem within a fixed time period is the best real world scenario for programmers. No project has an unlimited budget, so no one gets unlimited time in the real world.

> Solving a problem within a fixed time period is the best real world scenario for programmers.

Not if the fixed time period is 45 minutes with an interviewer looking over your shoulder.

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

#436

Post by aje403 »

0xdeadbeefbabe wrote: post #432
aje403 wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So basically hire the guy who, if you tap on his cubicle, will have a heart attack and sue your company? If you hire a pretty girl too, does he forget how to speak english? Why not just hire someone who doesn't have panic attacks too bad to code fizz buzz instead?

Does it bother you that you don't know the answer?

Bother me I don't know what answer? I don't follow. I think it makes sense to hire people with communication skills unless you're specifically looking to hire cave troll code drones

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

#437

Post by edanm »

FLUX-YOU wrote: post #315
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…

Look at other fields for examples. Few have to interview like devs do. Other professionals may have continuing education like conferences, but that's not the same. Imagine nurses or docs getting asked to take vitals for an interview.

Many fields not only have extensive education requirements, like law school for example, but May have mandatory internships at low wages for several years.

This kind of comment is exactly the kind of thing that makes some people think that software developers have no idea just how good they have it.

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

#438

Post by lowbloodsugar »

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 confused. On the one hand you say that the hiring practices are obnoxious, but then you agree that the only way to verify someone can code is to have them "actually pump out some code".

I now have two steps before an in-office interview: an online programming test, followed by a screen-share coding test. When I just did the screen-share test, I can't tell you how many people claimed to be java programmers and their IDE was eclipse, and then they didn't know how to start coding or run a program. "I know junit", ok, write a junit test and run it in eclipse: deer in headlights. Such a huge waste of my time. So now we do an online programming test, and many applicants fail to write code that compiles, let alone passes the test.

There are good applicants out there. It seems like they are vastly outnumbered by frauds. I have no other way to describe these people that cannot program, and just show up with a bullshit resume hoping for a paycheck. Before I was responsible for hiring, a man was hired on our team who could not program, despite a resume showing years of java work. Now he gets to go to the next place with our company on his resume. These frauds are hindering us finding the genuinely talented.

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

#439

Post by Florin_Andrei »

Clubber wrote: post #421
monksy wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Technically it's scrum that causes that, not Agile. Scrum is a way for people to make money off Agile via consulting. Srcum is rigid, Agile is the opposite.

This discussion takes me way back - it reminds me of people in the Eastern Bloc talking about communism. A widespread meme was that communism was allegedly good "in theory", it was just the practice that somehow got derailed.

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

#440

Post by squeaky-clean »

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.

With flask it's just `flask run` which will cover all your development server needs. I agree if it's about setting up a production environment, but I don't see them implying that.
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