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

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

#801

Post by jillesvangurp » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 7:33 AM UTC

I tend to regard interviews as an opportunity to determine if the company doing the interviewing is worth working for.

People like me are highly employable/contractable. So, the way an interview works is very simple: you got lucky enough for me to take note of the fact that you are looking for somebody with my skill-set and I've determined that you are worth talking to. Fantastic, because I ignore all HR & recruiter spam so you probably found me through some mutual contact that I trust. Great, now we meet and my expectation is for you to decide to hire me on the spot and be extremely enthusiastic about it and get in a mode where you are selling the job to me as something that I want. We both know that nobody else similarly qualified is just going to walk in and take the job. If so anyway, my advice is to hire them on the spot. No hard feelings. So, very simple choice. Either we like each other or we move on. You don't get to ponder your decision for very long. The words "home work exercise" typically don't feature in such a conversation.

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

#802

Post by meesterdude » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 7:36 AM UTC

gravyboat wrote: post #287

collyw wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have noticed a trend of not naming companies here. Is it against the rules? I fell that we should name and shame companies that are disrespectful of peoples time.

I've had multiple comments detached (as you can see by my comment history) for calling out companies that suck to apply for in the monthly hiring threads. Either the people who posted must have complained so they removed it, or HN doesn't want people to know some companies suck to deal with when it comes to hiring process.

Don't let the HN censorship discourage you. Name them and shame them!

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

#803

Post by meesterdude » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 7:50 AM UTC

stratigos wrote: post #769

Ive been grinding away at these for months... coming out of freelancing, latest contract with a startup that hit its burn rate and failed, and having beeen unemployed for almost 6 months (except not really unemployed, since contractors dont actually collect unemployment...). So many companies have these assignments. Theyre infinitely better than whiteboarding, or hacker rank tests, or "pair programming" on some crazy…

Man, thank you for writing this. I am totally in a similar boat - but at it for 3x as long. It looks like you are far more agreeable than me when it comes to these assignments.

Consider that for most jobs, there is naturally a 98-99% rejection rate. Only one position and 300 candidates. So assume that most coding exercises you do will go nowhere, will not be reviewed, and will leave you feeling disappointed.

You are a thought-worker, and an obviously talented one. The most important thing you can do is to stay nimble and don't get discouraged or bitter. Part of that means saying "no" to unreasonable requests. You don't have to full out say no - you can also just negotiate down the scope to something digestible.

Identify your limit and push back should anyone attempt to cross it. For me, if it's a good company and the test is reasonable, i'll throw in 2 hours. If it's a BS test, I'll push back or skip entirely.

These companies hiring with absurd processes do not know what they're doing - and will walk all over you/us if given the opportunity.

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

#804

Post by bryanrasmussen » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 7:53 AM UTC

I have had the 'normal' 3 hour assignments, but recently I had one that was timed - they gave you 1 day to do it. I got at 10 at night, I thought I would have time but the kids had tired me out and I could not stay up 1-2 hours getting environment set up that I needed.

So then actually I could not do anything about it until 5 in the afternoon the next day, I had problems with environment setup (hadn't needed this particular stack on my new machine so I hadn't set up and things had changed) so it took 3 hours. then I had to do dinner with the family, get kids to sleep. I didn't have the time available in my weekend to do a 3-4 hour assignment that also required 3 hours to get ready to work.

I sent off an email to the recruiter and said what happened and I wasn't really interested in anything similar in the future.

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

#805

Post by regularfry » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 7:56 AM UTC

hulahoof wrote: post #682

enraged_camel wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many non-tech employees view IT people as basically “computer janitors with bad attitudes”. Heck, I’ve worked in tech for a decade and I can count the number of people who have a positive view of their IT department in one hand.

To be fair, In my (admittedly limited) experience contracting at BigCorp - the IT department's procedures are often a bottleneck in a workflow or solutions. We all know they are following business procedure, but there will always be some unconcious tension with departments that hinder a solution (I see marketing and legal butt heads all day).

In my experience they're also critically understaffed.

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

#806

Post by meesterdude » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 7:56 AM UTC

fwdpropaganda wrote: post #262

Come on. People complain about problems they have to solve on the whiteboard. People complain about problems that they can take home. This is approaching simple lazyness / entitlement.

It's lazyness / entitlemant because we want competent hiring practices that are respectful of our time? Because when you have to work 40 hours in a week doing nothing but take home tests & quiz projects for companies you are interviewing for - for the 38th week in a row - and still not taking in any money for all this - it's more about affording food and paying rent.

The free work is the issue. Pay me for a day to do a project to validate my abilities and we're golden. I've done that at a few places, and it's a great way to go.

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

#807

Post by regularfry » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 7:59 AM UTC

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.

Framers and cabinet-makers are both carpenters, but they're very different jobs.

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

#808

Post by meesterdude » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 8:02 AM UTC

dosycorp wrote: post #21

I don't want to name names but one YC company I interviewed at left me with the distinct impression that they talked a big game, just to get me to work on one of their (apparently) "strictly-hiring-related toy projects" as homework. Homework, "sure", except it: 1) integrated with a real system, 2) mirrored something they actually did, and 3) they would only agree to proceed if I signed an IP/work contract and accepte…

> Anyway, I'm not going to name names because this is unwise to do that in a public forum.

Why not? create a throwaway if its a matter of coming back to you. Otherwise we really need to name and shame these companies if we have any hope of getting the practices to improve. Sunlight is a great disinfectant!

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

#809

Post by meesterdude » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 8:04 AM UTC

YZF wrote: post #764

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…

The homework doesn't get you the job though. You may need to go through 10 of those to find someone who wants to hire you and you also wanna work for them. Let's say you're currently employed, where are you gonna find those 10 weeks? Minuscule one-time effort? You never switch jobs? There are lots of professions that make just as much or more as your average software developer. Accountants, sales people, bankers, law…

> You may need to go through 10 of those to find someone who wants to hire you and you also wanna work for them.

I am pushing 100. Man, if one of the first 10 I did panned out that would have been awesome!

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

#810

Post by meesterdude » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 8:07 AM UTC

newobj wrote: post #697

wpasc wrote: post #684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agreed with your main post, but landing 1 out of 3 interviews? I know several people who got offers at both Facebook and Google out of school who did not hit a 1 out of 3 ratio of offers to interviews

Ok. It was a SWAG. My point being that a systemic failure to land a coding job is a problem with you, not the interview process(es). My sentiment in my original reply is that I hear a lot of complaining about "i was asked to code binary search" interviews, which seems to come with an implicit but unstated "...and i failed to code binary search, therefore it is bullshit" statement attached to it. Somehow I feel like i…

> My point being that a systemic failure to land a coding job is a problem with you, not the interview process(es).

The statistics on this speak a far different truth - one where most of the time, you're going to get rejected no matter how good you are, because you're competing with hundreds of other candidates for one position.