131–140 of 179 posts
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Unfortunately the homework project is usually followed by an in-person whiteboard hazing, which nullifies those benefits. I recently interviewed with a well known tech mini-giant who admitted that my homework assignment was among the best they’ve received, but still flunked me based on the in-person slugfest so YMMV.
Name and shame. This is disgusting.
Opportunity cost, wise: the bottom of the barrel for pay is Day Labor, where I can make about $100/day after a 1-2 day wait list... putting the fair market price of the homework assignment at about $250. The hiring manager did Venmo me $100 for food, which was well appreciated... but unfortunately still didn't give me what I needed to do a good job on the homework. Not that it's directly productive work, but considering head fees are in the 5 figures, a little compensation to grease the gears doesn't seem like it'd hurt even in aggregate. Perhaps it'd incentivize the hiring company only giving homework to better screened candidates, as well.
Makes different points than ones in the article, which are the original reasons I opposed homework. But in addition to all that, it also blocks people without good living situations from the job (perhaps desirable for some reasons, calling it out).
If there really is a developer shortage that we're always hearing about, then why don't more developers say "f. you" and walk away from homework assignments, 5-round interviews, cubicle farms instead of offices, etc. It would be a self-correcting problem -- companies that wanted good candidates would stop doing this shit. The only explanation I can come up with is that the developer shortage doesn't exist. Maybe it's…
Because ultimately the number of people who get really upset by interview process is small. Developers largely care about being paid large sums of money. Issues like open office design and take home work are tolerable when you are paid 300k.
>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…
The problem is effort asymmetry. For in-person interviews, company must spend as much time as candidate is spending in evaluation. If homework thing becomes standard, I'm afraid that will become first line of filtering because it doesn't cost much to company. So you will still get in-person interview and may be even bit of whiteboarding (to make sure your friend didn't took test for you or somehow you cheated out by…
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Excellent observation. We should all be asking ourselves why the laws of supply and demand aren't asserting themselves in the software development space. From what I see, companies are aggressively forcing rates lower and doubling down on insanely obtuse hazing rituals. If demand were truly inelastic (what a "shortage" would imply) then rates/salaries would be rising and the on-boarding processes would streamline. Th…
My interpretation (which I think is "more correct" than yours and your parent's because it subsumes both) is that there's a good developer shortage and bad developer glut, and the interview process is an attempt to sort an individual developer into one of the two buckets. Although from personal experience, I've been rejected from several companies and gotten more than one amazing offers at the same time (i.e. in the…
What this translates into industry is that managers and companies continuously grind through candidates in an attempt to find 10x rockstar ninja cliches, rather than finding diamonds in the rough and trying to just train people.
Of course, there are going to people who are worse than that level of quality. Maybe there should be some sort of guidance for them, that even if they fail interviews, they should at least get feedback as to how they can improve themselves, instead of being stuck in bad interview death spirals.
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One major problem is that the employer has the right to monetize work products that are close enough to your jobs work. So if my side project is writing a novel, there isn't much danger and the employer must basically grant the permission.if it is related to coding things get trickier. With a contract for coding I would basically transfer monetization rights to you. for that I would have to ask my employer. So I woul…
"Side-work permit"? Is that actually a thing?
I did one time formally ask (just to see what would happen) whether I could volunteer at the Red Cross, which demanded I sign a boilerplate intellectual property agreement saying anything I made as a volunteer belonged to them. The letter of my employment agreement was incompatible as all IP I made belonged to my employer. The question went all the way up to the corporate counsel, who presumably said "obviously a troublemaker wasting my time with this sh*t" and responded "NO".
I thought about writing the CEO because it was absurd you technically couldn't volunteer with the Red Cross, but of course, there were most likely lots of people who simply ignored the issue and/or ignore what they sign. There were certainly people in my division who appeared to be flagrantly violating the prohibition on an outside business while employed, but no doubt had the sense not to specifically ask permission.
The title is a little click-baitey, because it suggests full on assault on homework. The actual post is more measured in its criticisms, but basically the idea is: don't use homework as a cop-out for not having a good interview process, and thereby likely wasting everyones time. Personally I like homework, because it allows me to show my strengths (actually writing code that is solid) without being "under the gun" in…
Ya I agree, I was all ready to blast it but then realized it had a couple good pointers in the case that you are gonna offer homework. I do disagree with the premise though. As someone who's worked in the tech field for 15+ years and has been on plenty of interviews, I for one would much rather do a short homework assignment than have to stand in front of a few people and white board shit in real-time. Here are reaso…
When my last gig got over I went through 10 places over a month and a week to find my next place. If homework was always only 2 hours each time that would be half a work week. The last homework I had to do actually needed some environment setup, but things had changed in some library etc. and I went through nearly 2 hours to setup environment I needed for the assignment. The homework was timed, I had 24 hours to complete from time it was sent. Somebody was sick that weekend and as a consequence I did not finish the assignment.
Supposedly applying for a job should take some hours to tailor make your resume, your cover letter and so forth, then some time to travel to interview and now extra hours to do homework. As far as might get me a great job it's been my experience that what it gets me is a job where people value getting things done but also having fun while doing it, with some foosball games and other perks littered about an open office all seemingly decorated by the same team working globally. There will of course be opportunities to determine the technical direction of projects and perhaps the company as a whole! etc. etc. Perhaps I am fortunate that all my jobs are great, but on the other hand if that is the case I am more likely to go for the job at the place that doesn't make me do the extra hours as opposed to the one that does.
on edit: of course people do complain about having sex infrequently but it is the infrequently they complain about, not the having.
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To add to this; if a company does want me to put effort into proving I can code a solution to whatever problem, then they better have gone to the trouble of: a) setting up a git repo with working code in it (including tests, dependencies and whatever else) so I don't have to worry about inane(but taxing) decisions in terms of project structure/code style. Also, verify it works before sending it out to candidates. b)…
(c) and (d) are sensible suggestions, but I've got to question your (a) and (b). It sounds like you don't think much of testing, if you're expecting tests to be handed to you. Testing is hard! Writing good test cases can be as hard as writing the code itself. If your tests are inane, then you're going to catch the easy bugs and miss all the hard ones. And when on Earth do you get clear and detailed instructions on wh…
Should have been clearer They should have tests to cover their code (not the code I'm going to right).. This cuts down on me adding testing libs needed, any setup, and laying down a pattern for their expectations(wrt tests). With expectation dev would add tests to cover their code.
> And when on Earth do you get clear and detailed instructions on what is expected?
On the job, I have easy access to the information/easy access to the people with the information. Not to mention personal relationships with the people I need to query.
My usage of 'inane' refers to things that a dev on the job won't be doing 99.9% of the time. Things that take effort & thought to setup(initial project setup) but don't really give any insight into whether a dev can write & architect code well. All the things a company already has in place.