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“This project will only take 2 hours”

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Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”

#111

Post by agent327 »

sildur wrote: post #74
jstx1 wrote: post #66

Reminds me of how some companies give take-home assignments to job candidates. > Here's a task that takes a day to do sloppily and at least two days for you to show your best work. We want to be respectful of your time so please don't spend more than 2 hours on it.

I only accept paired assignments. If you are going to use my time, the least you can do is offer an equal amount of time on your side.

How does this work? Who is the other party (someone from the company?) and what do they contribute?

Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”

#112

Post by toyg »

Jensson wrote: post #23
chaxor wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Running the program at start isn't programming, it is putting it in a "run on start" location, helping users do that is a part of managing the project and not programming. I'm confused by this. Any program that doesn't automatically set up this 'autostart' capability in an OS/architecture independent manner is much more of scriptkiddie solution than a real program. If a program isn't made to run on any OS and any a…

This was supposed to be a student hobby project, not a company product release. You are thinking of this problem from the perspective of an enterprise programmer, not of a hobbyist enthusiast.

The opposite is actually true.

The enterprise programmer thinks nothing of deploying some J2EE monstrosity with "simple" setup scripts and "just change this Windows parameter in registry" and "run this command to create a service to start and stop from Services.msc". That's what they live and breath, that's the bar they are happy to clear.

The hobbyist enthusiast, on the other hand, will only have knowledge of actual consumer-grade software that "just works", so he will be at pains to make installation and execution simple and straightforward. He will take pride in every slick "just works" capability he can add, every tiny bit of OS integration he can squeeze, every line of setup-requirements documentation that can be removed.

One of the problems in the development of modern programming is that half the hobbyists are eventually horrified by the amount of effort it takes to develop on "modern" platforms and principles, and just give up; while the other half fall in love with such complexity, and happily proceed to add more, making the situation worse for the next generation. So development practices get harder and harder for no real reason.

Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”

#113

Post by agent327 »

nextlevelwizard wrote: post #108
fumblebee wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The take-home assignment seems to me a slightly broken system; it's easily gameable because there's zero supervision. Let's say there's two candidates for a position who are both asked to complete the take-home assignment, Candidate A and Candidate B. Candidate A is the superior candidate and spends only two hours on the task (as requested), and Candidate B spends 2 days. Candidate B submits the better assignment and…

If you have 2 hours to submit the task and you submit it after 2 days you are already out

So... you select for people that can get home within two hours and still have enough time left over for the assignment, as well as people that are willing to do the assignment in the parking lot?

Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”

#114

Post by nextlevelwizard »

agent327 wrote: post #113
nextlevelwizard wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have 2 hours to submit the task and you submit it after 2 days you are already out

So... you select for people that can get home within two hours and still have enough time left over for the assignment, as well as people that are willing to do the assignment in the parking lot?

Oh, we don't even meet face to face before you write code. We setup a time where you have X hours open and then we send you an email with couple different assignments to choose from. Then we expect to have your code email back to us within X hours.

Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”

#115

Post by toyg »

AstralStorm wrote: post #107
toyg wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In The Good Ol' Times, I would have replied "let's check the TLD", but now that list is basically trending to include the entire English dictionary... so I guess the only response these days is "ask DNS". So we've already gone from "pattern-match a string" to "pattern-match then make network calls", which (as anyone who's done any network work knows) also requires managing a bunch of possible/likely error states (off…

Can't quite do this most of the time due to privacy concerns. Leaking random URL-looking text to the network is a big no.

So now we have to ask for user consent (installation time? first run?) and respond accordingly, adding another piece of UI... but it will only take an hour, right...?

Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”

#116

Post by jstx1 »

nextlevelwizard wrote: post #114
agent327 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So... you select for people that can get home within two hours and still have enough time left over for the assignment, as well as people that are willing to do the assignment in the parking lot?

Oh, we don't even meet face to face before you write code. We setup a time where you have X hours open and then we send you an email with couple different assignments to choose from. Then we expect to have your code email back to us within X hours.

This might be the worst technical assessment format I've ever heard of. I really don't get the reason for adding time pressure to this. You're combining the worst elements of take-home assignments and whiteboard interviews.

Why not send people the assignment and ask them to return it within a couple of days? What are you gaining by limiting it to hours and turning it into a remote exam?

Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”

#117

Post by Jensson »

jstx1 wrote: post #116
nextlevelwizard wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, we don't even meet face to face before you write code. We setup a time where you have X hours open and then we send you an email with couple different assignments to choose from. Then we expect to have your code email back to us within X hours.

This might be the worst technical assessment format I've ever heard of. I really don't get the reason for adding time pressure to this. You're combining the worst elements of take-home assignments and whiteboard interviews. Why not send people the assignment and ask them to return it within a couple of days? What are you gaining by limiting it to hours and turning it into a remote exam?

This way it ensures you only spend 2 hours on it without being penalized. If you are free to spend any amount of time you can be sure someone spent 40 hours working on it, you really don't want to compete with that. So another person would say that this combines the best from take home and white board, you don't have to travel anywhere for the interview, you get to do a project rather than algorithm, and it doesn't waste a lot of your time.

Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”

#118

Post by naniwaduni »

skytreader wrote: post #47
Jensson wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but was that what the students asked for? I doubt they thought that they could launch a successful product in 2 hours worth of work.

I'm sorry but I gotta call this out; this is just peak HN arrogance. All we have is an article relating an anecdote and the reaction to it is to second-guess the author's actions/interpretation of events. Surely, the author has more context of what was actually happening, what was actually being asked for? The actual words used were already vague enough ("ideas for a software project"). The answer to that would alway…

The content of the anecdote related implies a disconnect between what the students' and the authors' understanding of the situation. This seems like pretty good reason to believe that the author was plausibly wrong about what (at least some of) the students were asking for.

People who write blog posts on the internet are not exactly immune to poor communication.

Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”

#119

Post by jstx1 »

Jensson wrote: post #117
jstx1 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might be the worst technical assessment format I've ever heard of. I really don't get the reason for adding time pressure to this. You're combining the worst elements of take-home assignments and whiteboard interviews. Why not send people the assignment and ask them to return it within a couple of days? What are you gaining by limiting it to hours and turning it into a remote exam?

This way it ensures you only spend 2 hours on it without being penalized. If you are free to spend any amount of time you can be sure someone spent 40 hours working on it, you really don't want to compete with that. So another person would say that this combines the best from take home and white board, you don't have to travel anywhere for the interview, you get to do a project rather than algorithm, and it doesn't w…

A 2-hour project is hardly a project. It's still a contrived problem with limited scope. I don't see it as an improvement. And you're assuming that the person who is assigning the task can estimate it correctly (this goes back to the topic of the OP).

I suppose people's preferences vary a lot. Personally, I would turn this down. The format of "do as much work alone under pressure" is extremely offputting. I'd much rather do a whiteboard interview where the problem is well scoped in time and I can discuss my solution with the interviewers. I also wouldn't mind a take-home that actually takes 2 hours that I can do whenever I please - but asking for the work to be returned within hours is a dealbreaker for me.

Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”

#120

Post by Jensson »

zuj wrote: post #85

When someone says this should be easy... I would like to show them the flow chart for how slack notification works. https://imgur.com/gallery/0p5bV Just "notify the user"... imagine the amount of code and the number of APIs this needs to touch. Software is way complex and devil is in the details.

The hardest pill to swallow is marginal difficulty. Everyone can agree that writing something like a modern full fledged browser is hard. But how hard is it to add a small feature to said browser? Well, the feature in isolation is easy, but the entire browser at that scale is much more complicated than the sum of its parts, so the difficulty comes from incrementing the complexity of the entire browser and not from how hard the feature itself was. Good code design can alleviate this a bit, but not entirely.
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