Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

An unintended consequence of these coding assignments is that it creates a pervasive labor market that optimizes for finding candidates that already know things. Historically, joining the labor force, and a company, required training. Letting this behavior continue permeates the expectation that corporations can shirk on their duty to train and build employees. Instead, they have the luxury of finding cogs ready to go, out of the box.

I think we need to stand up and advocate for the expectation that corporations should provide more value to society than just print money. They should be held accountable to creating a strong, and healthy labor force.

Preparation for live-coding, leetcode style interviews takes way longer than any take home.

Kids on Blind are doing 200+ leetcode problems before starting their interview loops. How many hours is that?

You’re basically just choosing to forget about all the prep needed to ace a DP problem on the spot.

According to the HN gestalt, you shouldn't do a whiteboard interview because that's too unrealistic because nobody programs on a whiteboard, you shouldn't expect programmers to code with their laptop in an interview because that's too much pressure and also unrealistic, you shouldn't expect programmers to be willing to do a take home exam because that's too much work without money (and if people did pay, the complaint would smoothly shift to it not being enough money and still being too much work), and you shouldn't just hire people with the intention of rapidly firing them if they don't work out because that's cruel to uproot them like that if you're just going to fire them. Recruiters are also out because they suck and also drain money out of the transaction for no gain since they bring no value to the process.

Apparently the approved HN method is to arrange the resumes on a dartboard, throw darts at it, and commit up front to hiring whoever you hit unconditionally for at least two years without no possibility of having to fire them. Or something like that.

Setting limits on what you will do is good, and ghosting is bad, certainly.

But in the end, you're going to have to do something unfun to get hired. There's no way around it. I know we'd all love to live in a world where Google one day just logs on to LinkedIn and is so impressed by the sheer brilliance of our awesomeness which just somehow oozes through our listing despite the fact we didn't have to do anything to demonstrate it, as it's also unrealistic to expect programmers to have a lot of publicly-available demonstrations of their skill such as open source projects (forgot to mention that one!), that instead of hitting you with a job interview they just lead with a job offer for their best position, but that's just not going to happen.

This is the way.

Counterpoint: as a self-taught SWE with only a degree in economics, I wouldn't have been able to get my first job in the industry without a take-home assignment. It was the only possible way to demonstrate that I was qualified to take the job.