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Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

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Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#51

Post by pc86 »

Up front, ghosting is not okay in general. But, a few counterpoints: It seems very unlikely they expected or wanted it to take you 6 hours. Possible, but certainly an outlier (and obviously bad actor) if so. If they expected you to spent 1.5-2 hours on it - a reasonable amount of time IMO - but when got it back you clearly spent an entire day working on it, that's enough to fail because you didn't follow the directions.

Additionally, software development seems to be the only area where the candidates get bent out of shape being expected to prove they know what they're doing. Take home tests are bad and have to be confined to an hour. Whiteboard interviews are bad and don't accurately model the day-to-day. Leetcode is bad because it's 10x harder than anything you'll work on. How exactly do we expect someone to get a sense of our skill at programming if we eschew every opportunity to... program for them to review? The exception might be extremely well-known people who have extensive public histories on GitHub or something similar, but by definition they're in the minority and 99.9% of companies don't need someone of that caliber.

I interviewed with a health tech startup and they had a good way to do it. We set up a time ahead of time when I'd be given access to the repo. 90 minutes later the interviewer was going to clone the repo and whatever was there was what he was going to look at. This was after a previous ~hour long interview where we did the "tell me about your experience" rigamarole that some developers seem to think should be enough to get them any job.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#53

Post by quickthrower2 »

I am not too sure getting paid for them honestly makes much difference. For an average job hunt the amount you would be paid is small compared to the hopeful raise you get. Plus tax complications.

Before doing an assignment just work out the “pot odds” and see if you want to raise or fold. Yes it is basically poker!

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#54

Post by adastra22 »

jjgreen wrote: post #41
yitchelle wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatively, you could say..."for my time spent after the 1st hour, I will charge you $200/hour. Are we good to proceed"

My take on this what they were testing whether I could be pushed around, and I won't be. I'd not want to work at a place that plays those kind of mind-games.

You are, of course, correct. You still could have made $XXX/hr for the privilege to continue this charade and then reject their offer.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#56

Post by androa »

androa wrote: post #34

I do a lot of interviews for my company. We do coding assignments OR let you bring some code. We just want to talk with you about code that you are very familiar with and confident to talk about. Almost everyone chooses to do the small coding assignment, because they don't have code to bring.

If you get to talking about code (usually after a quick seeding of applications and a 30 minute chat), we will always talk about the code and also give feedback on our impression. So even if you don't make the cut, we hope to provide valuable feedback on why.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#57

Post by marcinzm »

wccrawford wrote: post #40
water8 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well apparently he needed it because they felt his coding skills weren’t good enough to hire

We don't know that. Perhaps someone else appeared to have more skill.

Or they had too many applicants and ignored him randomly, or they had an internal transfer, or they decided they didn't like his resume and never even looked at his code (no cost to have him do the exercise after all...), or they didn't like his style of tabs vs spaces, etc.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#58

Post by dcminter »

101008 wrote: post #29

I've been in both sides, and what they did to you was horrible. Just last week I had a call with someone who did the take home assigment very badly, but I wanted to give him some feedback and showed him a better solution. Nonetheless, I can't think of a better solution for this. Hiring someone is a big commitment (for both parts), so I want to be completely sure that I am hiring the right person. How do you that? How…

Do pair-programming exercises. When the hiring company is investing a proportionate amount of their time in the process then I'm much more willing to participate.

It's much the same vein as that Canonical recruitment questionnaire that was doing the rounds a while ago - if you want to sit with me (virtually or IRL) and ask me questions, that's fine. If you want me to submit an essay that takes me hours to write then you're going to have to be offering me something I cannot possibly get elsewhere!

In the end it's about mutual respect.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#59

Post by Nextgrid »

blupbar123 wrote: post #33
aranw wrote: post #8

I've had this before from a big company in the Go space. They constantly still sent me job ads and requested for me to interview and repeatably ghosted me. Wasn't until I direct messaged the CTO on a public Slack community to find out that I had not passed and that was why they wouldn't consider me and why I had been repeatably ghosted. No feedback as to why I failed the test or anything

>No feedback as to why I failed the test or anything As a company, you can't really provide feedback on why people failed the test. Hell of a lot of people will get defensive and get into arguments with you that you don't have time for. I agree however that one should at least tell you you are being rejected instead of ghosting you. That's just bad manners.

> Hell of a lot of people will get defensive and get into arguments with you that you don't have time for.

I find this to be a bullshit cop-out. You can always ghost them after providing initial feedback if you don't want to engage in arguments.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#60

Post by iambateman »

To me, there are three tests to figure out if a home assignment is reasonable…

1. Is it actually giving the employer more confidence or information about your candidacy?

2. Is it within the normal bounds of an interview? If someone asked you to do another 60 minute technical interview, would you?

3. Is the company clearly not trying to use the product of your code challenge?

To be honest, there are a lot of people who can look impressive but turn out to be totally under-skilled at coding. I’m sympathetic to hiring managers who feel like they need to test for that. As long as it’s not a super long exercise, they’re not just hazing you, and they’re not trying to use the results, I think it’s fine.

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