101–110 of 471 posts
To a large degree, these look like no-name companies who probably have to resort to this kind of thing to make up for worse pay and benefits as compared to FAANG.
How can more companies adopt this and give candidates more take home tests rather than leetcode
I really don't understand the idea that take home is somehow more fair or accurate than whiteboards. I've judged and taken both whiteboards and take homes. Take homes are more annoying for the candidate, and in my experience much more subjective from the interviewer. In my experience take home is the absolute worst way to pick a candidate.
Take homes can actually be compiled and executed against a test suite for correctness.
Take homes tend to be more realistic exercises than balancing a f-ing tree or walking some idiotic graphs.
If I were a large company with money I would simply ask all qualified applicants if they would be willing to work on a small part of a real project as a contractor with the possibility of getting hired. Applicants get paid for their time, productivity is achieved, jobs might be offered, everybody is happy.
That only works if the workload is low enough to do with a full time job, potentially out of state. It is a good idea, but nobody is going to be quitting their current job to be a contractor with a job MAYBE attainable. It remains me a lot of retail seasonal employees who work their butts off to MAYBE get a full time position. I'd also want there to be a clear decision-point (i.e. it isn't a way to get you to be an i…
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Sure - That would neatly eliminate majority of qualified candidates :-) Very few people who are successfully employed would take a risk / have a luxury to forsake their certain employment for an extremely short term contract (with all the registration, taxation, regulation etc headache this implies!) and extremely limited chance of gainful employment. (it's perspectives like these that make me realize how much of a g…
>with all the registration, taxation, regulation etc headache this implies! It's not if you are in the US. You will get a 1099 from where you worked, you write it on your 1040 and include the 1099 with your taxes if I recall from when I was an independent contractor for a while. It takes maybe like 10 minutes extra and 1099-ing is incredibly common nowadays (unfortunately) so not a super weird case. And it's not regu…
>It's not if you are in the US.
Its also not if you are in Australia. I'd suggest that the number of developers and designers who at least occasionally take on paid side gigs or who have revenue generating side projects (even if it barely covers hosting etc) is about 1/3.
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> they often give a very good and reasonable signal that often has a high corollary to work performance Do you have any statistically significant data to back this claim?
There is statistical data saying the opposite: http://chrisparnin.me/pdf/stress_FSE_20.pdf That whiteboard interviews are actually testing how you perform under stress rather than how good you are at your job. Additionally, in my opinion, it measures how good the interviewer is. If you get a bad interviewer or even just one in a bad mood, just pack your bags because you aren't getting it. Whiteboards are incredibly a…
Assuming the study’s results are valid, that’s really all the justification we need to get rid of these tests.
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I'd much rather do a take-home project at my own pace funded by the company, seeing as how my personal GitHub is a barren wasteland (well...it was before I started working for an OSS company).
In the future, when looking at github becomes a standard hiring practice, companies will start going full closed source so that their talent can’t jump ship.
My current employer doesn't have explicit rules that I'm aware of, but early on, I asked our HR person if I could work on open source outside work and they said something along the lines of "what's open source?" Which, I mean, on the one hand what do you expect from HR, but on the other hand, the entire agency is concerned with operating, maintaining, and developing a software system.
Oh God, here we go again. Coding on a whiteboard in an interview is not "broken". What is "broken" however is making the problem the candidate needs to solve "hard". I can't stress this enough: a whiteboard coding test is nothing more than a negative filter . It's to filter out people who can't turn a simple idea into code as these people exist. This is why FizzBuzz was such a simple problem. But interviewers fall in…
>which will generally require a certain level of communication skills and presentation ability, is the right place for you. It's really not about presentation ability. It's "oh shit I have x minutes to do this and I have to get it right or I won't get the job, oh shit 5 minutes passed already and I haven't done anything" type of anxiety.
"Oh shit, I have to get up and talk about my project. What am I going to say? What if my director thinks I'm an idiot? What if they ask me a hard question? What if I can't answer the question? Will they cancel my project? Will they bring in someone to rescue me? Will I get fired?"
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This proposal comes up in every interviewing discussion on HN. Apart from the usual rebuttals (you are generally hiring only from unemployed people pool this way), here is a fresh one - this opens your company's codebase for reading and writing (even supervised but, still) to anyone. If you already open-source your code it's not a problem but otherwise you don't want random people looking into your code due to: paten…
All large companies already have large contractor workforces that work on the non-critical products, I don't really see how that's different from employing highly qualified candidates with probably better resumes and referrals than those who are employed at 3rd party contractor companies.
If you’re only hiring candidates who can pass Google interviews, what are you offering that Google doesn’t? (Hint: “we give you a 10 hour take home, then ghost you” is not a competitive advantage.)