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

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

#891

Post by thomasrognon » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 2:36 PM UTC

lkrubner wrote: post #334

ModernMech wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks for this, I added this essay to my reading list. Breaking people out of the OOP worldview is currently one of my biggest professional challenges.

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

#892

Post by lmilcin » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 2:48 PM UTC

I work as a contractor which means I change projects fairly frequently.

In the past, I would sometimes accept the homework assignment. Now I refuse to do those (as opposed timed assignments where you get set amount of time, for example 2h, in which you are supposed to complete the assignment).

If the homework deadline is few days you can practically be sure that there will be candidates that will spend all that time perfecting their solution. What is supposed to take "2-4 hours of effort" in the words of the interviewer is actually the entire duration from the moment your competitors got their assignments until the deadline.

There are other reasons to refuse:

- you can spend that time working to find other offers,

- the interview is supposed to be both ways, they want to learn who you are but you are also supposed to learn who they are. Home assignments give practically nil information about your prospective employer.

- there are other ways to test the candidate with probably same or better results. Choosing a way which minimizes the effort on the part of employer but maximizes the effort of candidate shows lack of respect for the candidate.

- Home assignments are invitation for cheating. I can assume there are candidates that will take advice from others on how to solve the problems they are given so this is hardly proof of their ability. I refuse to take a test where I will be punished for my honesty.

- Even though the assignments tend to be time consuming they are typically hardly challenging. This is typically some mundane application and not really a test of your ability. My ability is to solve complex problems, organize complex logic, produce extremely reliable or efficient applications, draw from wealth of my experience to propose and discuss solutions. Yet another Pet shop written in technology of employer's choice is hardly any test. If you want to know if I can program at all you can learn it in few seconds of conversation with me, you don't need to force me to do 2 days of programming for this.

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

#893

Post by learc83 » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 3:01 PM UTC

marsrover wrote: post #752

learc83 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I question that bit of common knowledge. I went to a large state school for undergrad and tutored people regularly. By senior year, even the bottom performing students wouldn't have had a problem with fizzbuzz or similar screening problems. We regularly had coding problems much harder than that on tests. Unless there were other factors involved like maybe the pressure caused by the weirdly adversarial hazing process…

I personally went to college with someone who could not program at all when he graduated. He made a lot of friends and had a lot of help the entire way through. It's been 7 years and he has never worked as a developer.

>I personally went to college with someone who could not program at all when he graduated.

If you mean can't program fizzbuzz or simliar, how did he make it through tests? Did he cheat? In most classes I had, tests were around 60% of your grade.

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

#894

Post by notyourday » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 3:18 PM UTC

pdonis wrote: post #621

tytytytytytytyt wrote: post #546

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. The scenario here sounds like it's as relaxed and simple as you can get without it being so easy it tests nothing. Are you assuming the interviewer always yells like he's Sam Kinison?

> 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.

I worked with people who were hired with "can you do the job?" test and with people who were hired by "everything is wonderful, you are a special candidate that we just talk with" test.

The second group universally cannot perform under production pressure.

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

#895

Post by kraigie » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 3:28 PM UTC

eadmund wrote: post #867

gaius wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hiring process is a response to the fact that employers cannot trust a single word candidates say about their experience. This isn't paranoia Here's the thing tho': my CV is honest and my track record is pretty good: some small companies and some name-brand, well respected in their industries, known for probing interviews, over about 20 years. There may be some bad actors in the global candidate pool. But serious…

The problem is that a lying liar will also have a resumé like yours. How can I — who have never met you, and have no-one I trust recommending you to me — differentiate between gaius the awesome developer and gaius-prime the lying liar? I've got to administer some sort of test to distinguish the two, and the likeliest sort seems to me to be one which attempts to discern whether one knows the sort of stuff gaius would…

Which makes asking for a resume, rather pointless. There would likely be a lot more acceptance of fizzbuzz take home tests and so on; if that was instead of writing up resumes (replace one time suck with another instead of adding a second one in). However that makes it hard to justify paying recruiters.

Given how Da Vinchi had a resume its amazing we still use them. (His was better thoigh, it had his name and address, dates he worked for people and their names and address)

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

#896

Post by kraigie » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 3:35 PM UTC

BjoernKW wrote: post #789

typon wrote: post #754

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bingo. You end up becoming like all the other industries dominated by white men at positions of power (Law e.g.)

Even if that were the case, which I don’t think it is because the underlying problem is something else, the current predominant interviewing process does little to alleviate that problem as well. I don’t think we can magically solve inequality by trying to fix the interviewing process or by denying there are social networks.

Actually there are historical examples of where changing the interviewing process solved inequality. All it took was a curtain. You see there where few women in orchestras and it was said that this was because they didn't have the talent so couldn't get expirence, rather than being unable to get expirence due to prejudice. Then blind auditions started, interviewers would sit in front of a curtain, candidate would come in behind and play their music. Suddenly when the interviews could only judge on performance the same women that they said didn't have the talent where the ones they were choosing and that inequality was fixed. Now there might not work if the underlying cause is something else but it has worked.

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

#897

Post by kraigie » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 3:37 PM UTC

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.

Twitter and blogs would be an excellent approach for hiring marketers/growth hackers

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

#898

Post by WorldMaker » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 3:41 PM UTC

corey_moncure wrote: post #877

WorldMaker wrote: post #706

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Luckily, no one ever customizes their IDE, source control aliases, has wars over emacs versus vim, or uses an alternate keyboard layout.~ (Being forced to use someone else's machine is a developer hell with so many dimensions.)

I think this profession tends to attract obsessive and neurotic personalities by its nature.

It's not entirely obsession/neurosis either. Several of those things are valid training/familiarity needs and/or safety/ergonomics/self-care needs.

For instance, I nearly avoided very early carpal tunnel issues in graduate school by entirely relearning to touch-type on the Colemak keyboard layout. Sure it only takes a few minutes to switch to the layout on Linux and macOS these days, when I remember where the keyboard preferences are, but it still takes Administrator access and a software install in Windows.

Even "easy", that's still a cognitive load distracting from whatever the actual question was and starting into the actual problem. More importantly, at this point in my career, it's something that I'm going to see this as an immediate sign that employee ergonomics may not be a concern for the person giving such a test, which may speak to other aspects of the work environment.

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

#899

Post by Clubber » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 3:46 PM UTC

monocasa wrote: post #880

Clubber wrote: post #848

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why didn't you check references? I mean wouldn't you consider it a failure that you got a candidate to the interview table that was so bad? Assuming you aren't making it up, the guy was obviously lying on his resume, that could have easily been solved by checking his references.

Most places that firmware devs come from around here have a policy of only verifying dates of employment. That doesn't tell you much.

References would be personal references - someone with a cell number and call the college he attended; they should also verify enrollment and completion. You don't want to be calling the HR department. Also, a secret is if the reference (not HR) only verifies employment, that's a negative review. They are concerned about liability. If it was a good employee, the references have no qualms about saying so; it's the negative aspects that carry legal liability.

You need to ask for those, not just prior companies. My resume has a "References available upon request" at the bottom and I'd happily give them. Is that no longer practiced? It used to be a requirement.

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

#900

Post by retbull » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 3:49 PM UTC

_o_ wrote: post #798

magic_beans wrote: post #797

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I started on other peoples computers personally. I poked around and played with linux and some networking and when I went to school for it I realized that it was too late to learn it from the ground up. If you are still trying to figure out how a driver is written in C then you aren't up to date on any current programming paradigm. While I get that 20 years ago you needed to care exactly how memory was handled to properly optimize your code, now I am writing data processing jobs that take 10-15 TB of memory spread across 30 computers. If I fuck up 1 MB of ram per computer it really doesn't matter and it is way more efficient to just add another machine rather than pay me for two months of work to fiddle it down to perfect.

The scales I work at are more about Big O than anything. If I make a mistake that is N^2 vs Log N then I wait a week for a job to finish verses 1 hour. That is an issue. If I add on 10 min because I inefficiently use swap space it doesn't matter. I need to pay attention to the higher abstraction rather than the minute details. Sure I can fix a computer but if I do that rather than stopping a job from doing puts across regions it will cost the company 12000 dollars for each hour I am removing malware.