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

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

#911

Post by FireBeyond » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 5:21 PM UTC

lazyasciiart wrote: post #601

irq11 wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other option is to check references, do credential checks, and simple bullshit screens during interviews, like every other professional interview. Literally every other profession has this challenge! Programmers are unique only in their seeming inability to realize that they are not unique. Accountants are not asked to solve double-entry accounting whiteboard problems. Finance professionals are not given take-hom…

Every accountant attending an interview can produce a certificate from an accredited national group saying that they have taken an in-person, proctored exam on double-entry accounting, which is the 'credentials check' you refer to. There's nothing like it for programmers.

You mean a CPA.

My girlfriend has just graduated college with an Accounting degree.

> There's nothing like it for programmers.

What exactly is the difference between a BA (Accounting), and a BSc (Computing) in terms of validation?

Now if you want to talk CPA? Sure, but the equivalent of that would be a Software Engineering (similar to PE/CE/ME).

Apples and oranges.

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

#912

Post by LeozMaxwell » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 5:26 PM UTC

GeorgeSarkis wrote: post #864

IshKebab wrote: post #68

I think assignments are a really good way to test people, but they really do have to be short. The second-last job I got took around 4 hours which I think is fine. Helps if the task is a bit fun too. Also it shouldn't be the first stage of the interview process. That's just taking a piss. For this job it was after a phone interview, and with a scheduled face-to-face interview (where we discussed the code I'd written)…

Getting a (new) job in IT is an exercise in futility if you don't know someone inside, so essentially there's not an interview but an invitation. It's lower-status, more degrading and has worser odds than cold-call telemarketers trying to sell you some new credit card. By the way, when a telemarketer tricks you into answering his call, you don't subject him to a 3-days intensive rectal exam ("homework") just for the…

Also there's one and only one defense with respect to abuse either at interviews or after you get the job: having a large stash of money, which allow you to say NO to abuse.

At least 5 years runway, entirely on your own "payroll". If you're actually competent, that's more than enough time to pick any skill (possibly starting your own business rather than look for a job using it), if you can do 12 hours per day by your own choosing on whatever you see fit.

Don't have those 5 years but only 1-2 or, god forbid, have nothing more than a few months on top of a large amount of credit you have to pay back.... and you're in the 99% percent of desperate and destitute crowd who will submit to anything in exchange for a bowl of soup (guarantee they never break out of slavery).

Problem with the solution is that it's a vicious circle: if you don't already have those 5 years of savings, chances are you're never going to save them anyways.

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

#913

Post by newnewpdro » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 5:36 PM UTC

tytytytytytytyt wrote: post #538

trowawee wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take-home tests. Lower-stress environments for coding tests - working on their own hardware, working remotely, no panel interviews, no actively combative/aggressive interviews. Also, cool aspect of that: all of these options will make the interview process more appealing for everyone. And if the justification for angry/combative/aggressive interviewing is "well, that's how our culture is", I would say the company has…

> Take-home tests. But people are already crying over take-home tests being like working for free for the company, and then there's no way to prove they aren't cheating, which is a showstopper. That by itself is definitely not a "better suggestion for filtering out people who can't code". > all of these options will make the interview process more appealing for everyone. No for people who can competently handle an on…

I've participated in a lot of interviews on both sides of the process.

In my experience, the whole process goes a lot smoother when there's a take-home exercise. It turns the in-person interview portion into a technical discussion about a recent mini-project unencumbered by NDAs and trade secrets.

If you can't quickly determine if an applicant "cheated" on the take-home exercise through a simple discussion, then you may want to recuse yourself from performing interviews.

If an applicant can't make enough time for an appropriately scoped exercise, I think it's likely they're unqualified or they don't value the opportunity enough to make time. Those are undesirable qualities the recruiting/interview process is intended to filter out.

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

#914

Post by modbait » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 5:40 PM UTC

Clubber wrote: post #850

calcifer wrote: post #785

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not realistic. You and I are complete strangers; we can have a talk for 10 minutes where not a single word that comes out of my mouth is true and you'd be none the wiser.

If you are a programmer, you can tell; just ask them about their previous projects. Dig into their answers and ask follow up questions. What data structure did you use to do this part? What in the database was designed poorly and why? (Every database has a design issue). I mean if you were at a party and some guy came up to you chatting, claiming to be a senior whatever at BigTechCo, you'd start chatting him up and y…

Exactly.

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

#915

Post by ConceptJunkie » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 5:53 PM 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…

The reason we have to do is that you will find time and again that despite having a good resume and even interviewing well, that you will find that you've hired a person who literally has no idea what he's doing. I've seen it too many times to ignore.

I've also seen people that can ostensibly get the job done, but will write code that is so byzantine, so incredibly cryptic and opaque that no one else can understand it. I'm not talking about code that is incredibly clever, although that can be a problem, but code that is simply orders of magnitude more complex than it needs to be. From management's point of view, they've accomplished the task, at least in the short term, but to the people who have to deal with their code, it can require more work to make fixes or improvements that it would take to rewrite it all from scratch.

The real reason that it's so hard to hire a good developer, IMO, is that there are very few good developers, but a huge number of bad developers that have managed to convince their bosses that they are good, or at least competent, because there are also a not a lot of good development managers.

Can we really say that software development, as an industry, is really any better than it was back in the days of "The Mythical Man-Month"? Sure, the tools are lot more sophisticated and powerful, and the hardware has exceeded any reasonable expectations, and even imagination in some cases, but I don't think our ability to develop software has really improved all that much.

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

#916

Post by FireBeyond » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 6:00 PM UTC

kerberos84 wrote: post #881

lkrubner wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Maybe it is your essay why he asked you if you understand OOP.

That would be easily countered with "So... I read your essay and it intrigued me. As a baseline, to understand where you're coming from... can you...?"

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

#917

Post by ConceptJunkie » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 6:02 PM UTC

hansthehorse wrote: post #770

goatherders wrote: post #744

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wore a tie to school every day in high school. Then I did it again at a well know startup. In both instances someone pulled me aside to tell me "keep dressing like that and you're going to stand out." Yes.

I attended catholic high school in nyc from 1965 to 69 and we wore a sport coat and tie with dress slacks. Hair length inspections were conducted. It didn't kill anyone as far as I know.

The way I've always seen it, if you insist on being able to dress the way you want as a means of self-expression, then you really don't have anything worth expressing.

Dressing for comfort, or to suit the physical demands of your job are valid motivations. I wore a shirt and tie at my first job (back in 1987), but within a few years, I didn't bother any more because no one else did. Nowadays, "business casual" is fine by me.

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

#918

Post by BeetleB » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 6:02 PM UTC

pnw_hazor wrote: post #631

BeetleB wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>it's probably much cheaper and more efficient to hire faster and fire faster. Reality is otherwise. Lots of paperwork involved (for both hiring and firing). And leads to a not-too-great work culture.

Firing duds is the best moral booster there is. There is very little paperwork required to fire someone. If the employee is still on contract (ala contract-to-perm) just collect their badge and be done with it. If they are a W-2 employee with benefits, you hand them a few benefits notice forms and send them on their way. If they apply for unemployment, the company will get a notice that the former employee has applie…

>Firing duds is the best moral booster there is.

The Glassdoor reviews on Netflix suggest otherwise.

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

#919

Post by ConceptJunkie » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 6:15 PM UTC

athenot wrote: post #547

poulsbohemian wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Todd, is that you? Sounds a lot like the process used by someone I worked with years ago. It sounds to me like you’ve done some careful thinking about this, and it doesn’t sound unreasonable. One of my beefs really gets down to the interview process turning into a one-way grilling, dehumanizing the candidate into a “code monkey.” It sounds to me like you are trying really hard to evaluate their technical skills, but…

> dehumanizing the candidate into a “code monkey.” Bingo. A hiring process that attempts to convert the multidimensionality of humans to a handful of numeric variables is essentially trying to hire the best drone out there, not the best human fit for the job. I learn more about candidates from the types of questions they ask me, and their reply to open-ended questions I ask them, than from any technical grilling test…

A dev manager I work with insists that one of the best indicators, along with all the usual things you try to suss out about a software development candidate is whether or not he does any software development in his spare time. Not everyone who's good does, but there's a good correlation between people who would be good at writing software, and people who do it for fun.

So I would take writing software for fun as a plus, but would not take not writing software for fun as a minus.

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

#920

Post by melq » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 6:26 PM UTC

matchagaucho wrote: post #756

teachrdan wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I've made myself misunderstood. I'm not intending to put down IT work or the people who do it. But from a career perspective, if I want job security and a higher salary, I think it'd be a mistake, in the long term, to be seen as IT. IT is seen as a cost center, which leads to corner-cutting and outsourcing--even when it ends up costing way more in the long run.[0] 0. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jwebb/2017/05…

Tell that to $250 hr SAP and Salesforce Architects/Developers, or to Baby Boomer COBOL programmers who are given ever increasing incentives to post-pone retirement. IT is by far more lucrative in the long run. It's just the structure of RSUs and stock options that gives start-ups the illusion of relatively larger comp gains.

No idea what a 'salesforce architect or developer' is, but how would a COBOL programmer be considered IT staff? (In the context of this thread where IT staff == support staff)