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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

#791

Post by dvtv75 »

s2g wrote: post #604
neurobashing wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real talk? There is nothing wrong with being in IT. Imagine if someone said "I would be concerned I'd be seen as a carpenter and not a woodworking artisan". You're a carpenter. You nail boards together to serve the business interests of the company. Even if the boards are SQL queries or ReactJS or whatever. Companies need tech. You can bring value by making everyone's jobs better with your technology - sand off those…

> Imagine if someone said "I would be concerned I'd be seen as a carpenter and not a woodworking artisan". It's entirely reasonable for a carpenter not to want a job where they just nail pieces of wood together. Not really building anything, not really using skill. Just nailing a few boards together all day.

I think that sort of work is actually given to a "hammer hand" or a "builder" in New Zealand. I think a carpenter is a step above those.

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

#792

Post by _9vpl »

ksk wrote: post #298
theptip wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 qui…

I wonder if having multiple ways you can hire would be beneficial here. Behind Door number 1 is a confirmed job offer after 5 hours of grueling technical interviews. Behind Door number 2 is a 30 day probation offer after an hour long soft skills + tech interview, etc.. Maybe the lesson here is that the "optimal" strategy is to simply not abstract the problem. Its not "a person" you're hiring, its Bob. And Bob is more…

This is the most reasonable thing I’ve read in this thread. Totally makes sense.

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

#793

Post by erispoe »

reaperducer wrote: post #255
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…

> 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…

> Immensely more job security (Henry Ford didn't have an "exit strategy").

Ford is a public company. That's an exit. An exit is whatever makes your stock liquid, not the end of the company.

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

#794

Post by hvidgaard »

gowld wrote: post #200
hvidgaard wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is fine, just be upfront about it. Still require a contract for it is reeking of trying to get work for "free". If you have it running in production, and use it because you understand it thoroughly, it shouldn't matter what the candidate comes up with. Any new insight he might bring you can always incorporate with your own code. In any case none of the code is expected to be used in production, and if it turns o…

> Any new insight he might bring you can always incorporate with your own code Only if the contract is signed.

If you want to use the candidates code, then you have to have a signed contract. Nothing prevents you from looking at the code, and write your own version of it.

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

#795

Post by dblohm7 »

tytytytytytytyt wrote: post #377
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.

Not if you can find others who are just as good. And what's your better suggestion for filtering out people who can't code and not filtering out the good ones with anxiety?

I can't believe I just read this.

I hope to never work with you.

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

#796

Post by BjoernKW »

Retra wrote: post #758
BjoernKW wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, he didn’t. I said ‘network of trust’, not ‘cronyism’. - People starring your GitHub repository. - Someone following you on Twitter. - Someone linking to a blog post you wrote. - Someone recommending you to someone else because you did a great job on a project. These are all examples of informal networks of trust. I fail to see how that’s a bad thing.

Fuck that would be awful. I have 0 stars on Github. Don't use twitter. Don't have a blog. Only a few coworkers I even talk to. I spend my time writing code and interacting with my family, not trying to win popularity contests. Now if you're looking to hire celebrities instead of programmers, you're maybe onto something. I'm not a self-promotion artist. If I were, I would work in advertising.

Being trusted by your peers is different from trying to win shallow popularity contests.

That kind of aversion towards self-promotion might be a reason why we arrived at absurd phenomena like homework assignments for interviewing processes in the first place.

With no way to draw upon previous work results or third party trust how else is someone supposed to assess a candidate’s skills?

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

#797

Post by magic_beans »

_o_ wrote: post #781
retbull wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IT fixes peoples computers. Software Developers don't do that. We aren't Network Admins, we don't know how to set up or fix AD and we don't manage hardware. IT is a different field. I write software to process data and mostly I don't interact with hardware or troubleshooting arbitrary software directly. If I am offering support I am a level above IT. I understand that IT needs to be done but it is a very different jo…

... and that is wrong with the software development today. Our generations of developers started with playing games, using computer, reinstalling, configuring computers, then we started to mess with computers, os, hardware, network, routers, programing came in somewhere in the middle (we wanted to make a game, demo scene, ), cleaning malware, then we started automating the computer tasks, learned multiple programing…

Hop off your high horse, gatekeeper.

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

#798

Post by _o_ »

magic_beans wrote: post #797
_o_ wrote: post #781

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... and that is wrong with the software development today. Our generations of developers started with playing games, using computer, reinstalling, configuring computers, then we started to mess with computers, os, hardware, network, routers, programing came in somewhere in the middle (we wanted to make a game, demo scene, ), cleaning malware, then we started automating the computer tasks, learned multiple programing…

Hop off your high horse, gatekeeper.

Why, I have a good view from here :) And I can take great photos of scenery, now I do understand what the photos are showing is not something that everyone would love but still, those are photos, you can shoot the one making them but the scenery is not going to change by that, or we would just shoot all war journalists and there would be no more wars.

But joke aside, what is the issue, do you disagree?

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

#799

Post by Arn_Thor »

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…

So hire someone on a probation, and give them the boot if they don't live up to expectations in the first weeks?

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

#800

Post by exDM69 »

neurobashing wrote: post #295
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…

Real talk? There is nothing wrong with being in IT. Imagine if someone said "I would be concerned I'd be seen as a carpenter and not a woodworking artisan". You're a carpenter. You nail boards together to serve the business interests of the company. Even if the boards are SQL queries or ReactJS or whatever. Companies need tech. You can bring value by making everyone's jobs better with your technology - sand off those…

> Imagine if someone said "I would be concerned I'd be seen as a carpenter and not a woodworking artisan".

Carpenters build houses, woodworkers build furniture. IT people reinstall operating systems, fix printers and networking issues and software engineers write software. They have a different education, different job description and different pay scales. A woodworker wouldn't make a good carpenter nor a software engineer a good IT person or vice versa.

There is absolutely nothing wrong in being an IT person or a carpenter, they're reputable jobs that put food on the table. But if your trade is being a woodworker or a software engineer you should be slightly worried if you end up being put in a carpentry or IT. Or vice versa.

Disclaimer: I'm biased because I'm a software engineer and a woodworker. I'm good at my job but I can't fix networking issues or build houses.

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