41–50 of 179 posts
At Sourcegraph we faced the same decision and decided to go with an option for paid “homework” projects. It’s working very well so far. The payment is an important element of respect. More info at https://about.sourcegraph.com/blog/our-project-based-intervi... .
I am a founder of a company that helps companies with screening candidates[0]. I understand the negative response towards this. But I feel there is a balance here: We advice our customers to send smaller problems (~30mins) meant to pre-screen the candidates (without wasting too much of their time). This followed by a phone interview is currently the best funnel we know so far (and we have been working on this problem…
What would be an example of something at the same level you advise your customers to use?
Using homework as a first-pass screen in your interview process, unchecked, is definitely a smell that you're not using this tool appropriately.
However I use it in the process I've set up successfully as a way to give me something to code-review with a candidate when we do a final interview. It's a small, limited scope project. We give plenty of time to finish it. And the chances are good if you complete it we'll give you a final interview.
I find it helpful because I don't have to make assumptions about the candidates knowledge and skill level from a cold-start. I can ask them questions based on their code. How did you interpret this requirement? What trade-offs did you consider when you chose this data-structure? Etc. If their code shows an aptitude for computer science fundamentals I can ask them questions about algorithmic complexity in Big-O notation or I can scale it back and see if they understand the same concept using more descriptive means. Conducting an interview is hard if you don't have a starting point for a conversation.
For more experienced candidates with a history of open-source work do consider allowing them to present their own code in place of your standard homework assignment. It has the same effect and shows that you respect them enough to review their work. I think that's rather nice.
My company, a fully remote consulting firm, uses test projects for some candidates whose skills we cannot fully evaluate using the code samples they have submitted. We only use test projects under conditions designed to skirt the clear pitfalls mentioned in this article. - We pay all candidates for the test project, whether they pass or fail. The original article did not mention paying for homework, which we conclude…
Looking at the profile of the blog post’s author, she went to a prestigious school, worked at prestigious companies, and wrote a book on whiteboard challenges.
It is clearly very heavily in this person’s favor that interviews stay focused on these criteria over actual performance.
Our homework ended up weeding out some impressive looking candidates in favor of people who were less impressive and good at interviews but better at getting things done.
>Candidates spend many hours completing homework assignments for companies which are not sufficiently interested in them. This is abusing candidates. Knock it off. Given a choice of spending 2-3 hours on a take home assignment vs. 1 hour of writing code on a whiteboard in front of 3 or more developers, I'd choose the former any day. It's not even close. The author is taking one end of the spectrum and painting it as…
I would especially like to call out Uber on that as a couple of years ago they wanted me to write some local public transportation service endpoint integrated with Google maps in order to get to the onsite interview. Told them I don't have time for that with my full time job and they just shrugged and were like 'ok, no worries, we look forward to seeing you on X'. So I guess it was also a sucker elimination round.
I am a founder of a company that helps companies with screening candidates[0]. I understand the negative response towards this. But I feel there is a balance here: We advice our customers to send smaller problems (~30mins) meant to pre-screen the candidates (without wasting too much of their time). This followed by a phone interview is currently the best funnel we know so far (and we have been working on this problem…
These candidate screening portals that make me code in a web IDE are nightmare to me. My main problem with all of them is that I don't have a chance to talk to an interviewer real time to ask questions, express my thought process or go though the problem together. The time limit is usually harsh, once I needed 5 more extra minutes and the system shut down the test, zero points, but I had it coded 90% and the rest was…
- Like giving ample time to the test and then deciding from the report if to approve or reject.
- Hidden test cases are to avoid hardcoded solutions. I think these cases don't map to unit tests, they serve a different purpose here.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Supervisor had candidate sign mutual-NDA, work for hire at $X/hr rate & IP assignment agreement on docusign. This would be a violation of the candidate's employment contract at many companies.
Perhaps, but totally unenforceable... It's a non-issue. Developers are not slaves, and you cannot prevent them from doing outside work while looking for other jobs.
To cut the long story short: I would politely declined that model, even though I think it is sensible.
I had a friend that did an interview homework assignment, was declined for the job, then found out that they used his assignment's code in production through a friend that already worked at the company. While I'll admit that this is atypical, it seems like something a more nefarious company could abuse.
So it was an accurate depiction of what they would be working on? It seems like this is akin to the goal.