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

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

#771

Post by bgdam » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 5:01 AM UTC

gowld wrote: post #206

bgdam wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well when done this way with all the constraints you specified, then yes the homework interview works very well. Unfortunately, the vast majority of hiring managers do not come anywhere close to any of the points you mentioned. Just last week, I was interviewing for an opportunity as a VP of Engineering for a post-early-stage startup. The CTO gave me a take home assignment involving building not one but three complet…

Senior roles should have more demanding technical interviews than junior roles. The company had a bullshit-preventing immune system. It's not a culture fit for you. Win-win.

When hiring for a senior role, you should also consider that the person, who is already in a similar role, would not have the time to spend on your humongous homework app. When literally the only free time I have for myself and my family is a few hours everyday and then the weekends, I am definitely not going to spend the majority of that on an interview, not would I expect my candidates to do so if I were the one doing the hiring.

So yes, I suppose in a way it was not a culture fit for me, and that was indeed why I ended up withdrawing. I would also urge anybody interviewing for any role to evaluate whether a company which requires you to spend a substantial portion of your personal time, before you're even an employee, has the kind of culture you're okay with.

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

#772

Post by wolco » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 5:03 AM UTC

Clubber wrote: post #410

TheGRS wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So you decided to filter out good candidates in a new way; the take home test.

at least the take home test is similiar to a real world issue. Tons of issues with it but it's better than the live code remotely (live coding on paper somehow clicks well for me)

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

#773

Post by tytytytytytytyt » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 5:10 AM UTC

chrisbennet wrote: post #749

tytytytytytytyt wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It sounds to me that an assumption is being made because they didnt meet the expectations within a fixed time period. Of course, you have a limited amount of time to interview people. Please let me know when you figure out how to give someone an infinite amount of time to answer questions during a 1 hour interview. > The danger with this is that this is not a real world scenerio of how two people would approach a t…

I realize that you’re doing the best that you know how given the time pressures you have as an interviewer. There is no perfect answer to this problem. Here’s the thing though, you are “leaving money on the table” when your interview process deselects great programmers because of a mistaken belief that Test A is a good proxy for developer talent. When HN developers are telling that Test A is a bad proxy for developer…

A lot of that's true or might be true, but how do we improve things?

> you are “leaving money on the table” when your interview process deselects great programmers because of a mistaken belief that Test A is a good proxy for developer talent.

That's true for any non-perfect interview process at any job. The problem isn't that people don't know this, it's that it's hard to accurately measure who's good.

> you might consider trying to improve it with the advice given

Hah, as if the advice is something amazing! Which of these pieces of advice could we use that wouldn't make things worse in some way and also have a chance of being accepted by existing coworkers and managers? There's some great pie in the sky ideas, but nothing without serious issues.

> Pete Holiday, an Engineering Manager at CallRail in Atlanta, used to use homework as part of job interviews before realizing that he was ruling out good candidates. Some told him they didn’t have time for homework. Others may have never gotten to that point. “It’s way more inclusive to just have someone come to the office and talk to them,” Holiday said. “You’re not counting on them having time, or a computer at home. We have candidates with sick family member, single parents. Without the homework we can cast a wider net.”

So is homework worse than whiteboarding onsite? Who do we believe, some article or the crackpots here?

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

#774

Post by orangecat » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 5:11 AM UTC

booleandilemma wrote: post #233

I say this every time this sort of article comes up here, but seeing how ridiculous this field has become, I wish I had chosen a different career path. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to go through all this bullshit the next time I’m looking for a job. I have a friend who is a pharmacist and I asked her what a typical interview is like for her. She said interviewers will typically ask something like “tell me abo…

She said interviewers will typically ask something like “tell me about a difficult situation you had to deal with at work?”.

That's just another form of bullshit. I'd much rather write a for loop than try to figure out if the interviewer wants an honest answer or a humblebrag.

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

#775

Post by bad_user » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 5:16 AM 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…

> Yet, we do. Ok, then what about open source contributions (if they have them)? Well, sure, but we don't really know, for sure, if that code is their own or if they indeed truly wrote it, can we? So we can't count on it. It helps but it can't be an automatic "this person passes the technical" signaler.

Actually "open source contributions" isn't just about having some code dumps on GitHub.

First of all you've got the stream of commits, which is very gradual and shows you how the project evolved and since when. And you also have the issues, the pull requests, the interactions with other people. Those show you how the candidate communicated and collaborated with others.

You know if the code is his own or not because it's usually all there, everything that's needed ;-)

The industry's hiring practices aren't broken. What is broken is our ego.

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

#776

Post by frankzinger » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 5:42 AM UTC

tytytytytytytyt wrote: post #720

pdonis wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lots of real world problems are troubleshooted in less than that time, under more pressure, and have far more variables to consider/are far more difficult, like build failures. Yes, and they're troubleshooted by people who are already intimately familiar with the systems they're troubleshooting. Nobody in the real world writes an app for a requirement they've never seen before from scratch in 45 minutes.

> Yes, and they're troubleshooted by people who are already intimately familiar with the systems they're troubleshooting. So you're asserting interviewees shouldn't already be familiar with simple problems like reversing a list? Come on, give me a break. > Nobody in the real world writes an app for a requirement they've never seen before from scratch in 45 minutes. Being asked to reverse a list in 15 minutes isn't ev…

> So you're asserting interviewees shouldn't already be familiar with simple problems like reversing a list? Come on, give me a break.

Though it is clearly a simple problem, I've not had to reverse a list in any of the code I've written in the past 20 years. So I am not 'familiar' with the problem. I think I'd be able to solve it pretty quickly under normal work circumstances (even crises), but as many have said here already, working on something you've never done before with three strangers looking over your shoulder is a whole other dimension.

Many here and elsewhere have related the 'brain lockup' effect. Take me as another data point. It's real and it totally wrecks the interview for the interviewee and the interviewers, who lose out on a potentially good employee.

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

#777

Post by sudhirj » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 5:52 AM UTC

teachrdan wrote: post #265

reaperducer wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Our industry's hiring practices are absolutely obnoxious. Agreed. The solution is to not work at a tech company, but instead work in a tech capacity at a real company. - No silly games (before or after hiring). - Better benefits (I'd rather have proper health coverage and a pension than a room full of toys and vaporware stock options). - Immensely more job security (Henry Ford didn't have an "exit strategy"). - Peo…

Real talk? I'd be concerned that, at a non-tech company, I'd be seen as a IT rather than a software engineer. And the conventional wisdom goes that IT is a cost center. Some of the best career advice I've ever gleaned is to work on something that visibly makes money for the company. I get to do that every day at my tech company. I don't know that I could say that if I worked in a technical capacity in another industr…

This isn’t true any more with software eating the world. I work in movie distribution for instance, which was traditionally sending reels of film, but is now all RSA, certificates, HSMs, remote device management, logistics, Analytics, ticketing, databases and distributed computing. The software team gets pretty much the same treatment as everyone else, but everyone knows it’s the future of the company and sets a pretty high bar.

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

#778

Post by sudhirj » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 5:54 AM UTC

sudhirj wrote: post #777

teachrdan wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real talk? I'd be concerned that, at a non-tech company, I'd be seen as a IT rather than a software engineer. And the conventional wisdom goes that IT is a cost center. Some of the best career advice I've ever gleaned is to work on something that visibly makes money for the company. I get to do that every day at my tech company. I don't know that I could say that if I worked in a technical capacity in another industr…

This isn’t true any more with software eating the world. I work in movie distribution for instance, which was traditionally sending reels of film, but is now all RSA, certificates, HSMs, remote device management, logistics, Analytics, ticketing, databases and distributed computing. The software team gets pretty much the same treatment as everyone else, but everyone knows it’s the future of the company and sets a pret…

Speaking of which, our interview process is to ask you to solve a challenge on Github, but you’re free to keep it open source as an indicator of your skills. And it’s not work for us, these are obviously toy / proof of concept problems that we solved ages ago.

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

#779

Post by ereyes01 » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 5:55 AM 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…

Said space shuttle firmware engineer probably never had to solve a pop-quiz problem on a whiteboard. It's much more likely that he/she deliberated for weeks about a simple change with the rest of their team, and perhaps even with the person/astronaut they might kill if the change had a bad bug.

Who cares if this person can't solve fizz-buzz on the whiteboard? That's probably not even a relevant skill to the job opening you're filling, or a skill they have ever needed to hone or practice. It's like determining a marathon runner's worth by timing their 100 yard dash.

If I ever need to do another coding interview again, I'm gonna troll the person asking the question by pulling out my phone, googling their question, and consulting the stack overflow post in the search results to solve the problem. And why not, this is how I (and the vast majority of people) will actually get the job done in a real situation.

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

#780

Post by toephu2 » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 5:56 AM UTC

Retra wrote: post #755

toephu2 wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As it should have been. The fact that you have a PhD means nothing to Google, Facebook, and the like (except possibly a slightly higher base salary than a new grad w/ only a BS) The question is, can you whiteboard? They will be testing that. If you can, then all is golden and you probably didn't need to waste those 4-6 years getting that PhD because what you will be working on will have nothing to do with your topic…

I didn't have to answer any hackneyed technical questions or take any tests to get a job. The most technical thing I did was explain how a data structure I wrote works, which came up naturally in a conversation about what kind of programming I have done. If you can demonstrate that you understand programming concepts and can learn, then it's not much more to assume you can write code. If you need someone who can hit…

Google does not hire people by simply assuming the candidate can code. You do not get the benefit of the doubt, and in fact, you must prove otherwise. They want to see you write code on the whiteboard and solve the technical challenge given.