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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

#91

Post by CJefferson »

jerf wrote: post #76

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 complain…

You seem to have rapidly skipped over the exact thing no-one complains about -- a take-home piece of work paid at a reasonable rate. You just claimed people would complain.

I've done exactly this, and everyone seemed happy.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#92

Post by matthewmacleod »

I’d be annoyed about being ghosted too, but my takeaway from all the chat about recruitment is that there is no single process which is clearly and significantly better than all the others and they all suck in some way.

“Home assignments” suck because they can be unbounded and tend to disadvantage people who might not have a lot of time.

“Pair on a feature/bug” sucks because it’s quite hard to many people to demonstrate their skills in that stressful environment with someone they don’t know.

“Whiteboard Code Golf” sucks because it hands an advantage to people people who have the time and energy to grind shit they won’t use in their roles.

“Paid trials” suck because they’re not something that everyone can contractually participate in.

I honestly don’t know what the best approach is, from either side. I have stuck with a single take-home for devs on the basis that we can establish a clear rubric for evaluating them and try to be at least somewhat objective with what we are looking for. Maybe a better approach would be to let the candidate guide it a bit, and offer a selection of different evaluations that they can participate in?

At least I agree it’s important to maintain a clear line of communication and respond to everyone. I know it’s easy to let people fall through the cracks as you scale; I hope I’ve never done it myself but I can definitely advise that a robust ATS helps to make sure every application is tracked.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#93

Post by Verdex »

iambateman wrote: post #60

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 wh…

Yeah, I think this is reasonable. I had a pre-technical interview "take home" coding challenge, which was just: Reverse a string in whatever programming language you like best.

The technical interview itself drilled down more deeply into my skill level, however I can appreciate that they wanted to have a bare minimum idea that I could actually program before committing more time.

The favor was more than returned when they took me out to lunch in the middle of the technical interview and let me ask as many questions as I liked about the company.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#94

Post by Fire-Dragon-DoL »

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.

You can state _facts_ about the source code in a rejection email. It's annoying, you can't say things that would be useful, but there are always facts about source code that can be used for rejection.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#95

Post by rrwo »

kadirmalak wrote: post #63

Home assignments are a great way to evaluate a candidate. A "one hour" project would not be sufficient for that, the problem would be too easy. I find it weird that you guys don't want to spend some time to show your skills to the employer, without getting paid. These are not real projects. You're not benefiting the employer when you finish them. They also spend some time evaluating your project submission. (I'm not…

It's literally gambling with your time. You do the work, with the hope of winning a job.

That's several hours of your time that could be used for things that will have a more immediate benefit: working your current day job, working on open source projects, or maybe on some other hobbies or even spending time with your family. Or even sleeping.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#96

Post by oleg_antonyan »

gwd wrote: post #62
oleg_antonyan wrote: post #27

They are much better than livecoding. I take 8 hour home assignment over 1 hour livecode torture.

At least with live-coding, the company is investing at least as many person-hours as you are -- in my experience 2x as much, since there are normally 2 people doing the evaluation.

It doesn't matter if you are like me, cannot perform at all in such environment: stress, sweaty palms, high heartrate and inability to write anything harder than hello world.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#97

Post by flaviut »

kadirmalak wrote: post #63

Home assignments are a great way to evaluate a candidate. A "one hour" project would not be sufficient for that, the problem would be too easy. I find it weird that you guys don't want to spend some time to show your skills to the employer, without getting paid. These are not real projects. You're not benefiting the employer when you finish them. They also spend some time evaluating your project submission. (I'm not…

> They also spend some time evaluating your project submission.

I could evaluate a project in 5-10 minutes. Or an employer could have a fully automated system for the first round of evaluation.

The problem isn't benefiting the employer, it's that the costs are asymmetrical. The employer has no incentive to act in a way that respects the applicant's time.

There's a similar problem in real estate. If buyers weren't required to place a deposit with their offers, they'd waste the time of countless sellers.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#98

Post by Majestic121 »

morelisp wrote: post #69
sidewndr46 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you ask a candidate to complete such a thing and then they turn in obviously copied work, isn't the author who published it doing the hiring manager a favor?

We put a shibboleth in our test for this reason, there's ~20 solutions up on GitHub and 80% of them are wrong. Feel free to copy them, it makes it so much easier for me to grade.

What does shibboleth mean to you ? It does not seem to match the original meaning of 'a signal to differentiate people from the in-group'

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#99

Post by kasey_junk »

You encountered 2 problems and neither of them was the take home assignment. The first is that the company ghosted you. That is unacceptable regardless of what your hiring filter is. You’d be just as aggravated if they’d brought you in for 6 hours of interviews and then ghosted you.

The second is they didn’t set expectations (or at least you didn’t tell us if they did). Should you have spent 6 hours on this? How long does it normally take? After the assignment would you be brought in for 6 more hours of interviews or is the assignment the major filter?

At the end of the day, take home assignments are the best filter, the most equitable and the most efficient way to do hiring consideration. Companies (usually the middle managers within them) just don’t have the courage to use them correctly and don’t spend the resources to make them a good filter (they also don’t spend resources on the other job filters so those aren’t good either).

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#100

Post by JadoJodo »

The tactic I’ve employed at my company when vetting a candidate is to give them a link to a small code sample (usually a single class or service for backend, some JS/CSS for front end) to review the day before the interview. The code itself will include some obvious issues, some less obvious issues, some language specific opportunities for improvement, etc.

We then walk through their notes (if they made any), and the code sample itself together. I have them make any observations, critiques, suggestions, or other thoughts together with me. This gives me an idea of how they think, what issues they saw, how they would improve things, how familiar they are with the specific language, and coding in general. It also gives an opportunity for some light “conflict” resolution , if I push back on their thoughts.

This has worked really well. Those that don’t do well on the spot can make notes ahead of time (but aren’t expected to spend time coding for hours) and those that are confident can walk through it live.

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