Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok • Hacker News Board

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#161

Post by adriancr » Fri, Aug 12, 2022, 12:57 PM UTC

I love them, fun challenge, get to experiment with something new. (either by my choice or by requirements)

You also get an idea of what company cares about and if its a good match for you.

If you move to next step you did something right, if not then there are others that have done better.

Ghosting might be a problem like someone forgetting to process stuff, vacations, etc, just check with recruiter whats the status, dont be antisocial.

And if it took you 6 hours to do, you chose to do it, and hopefully you learned something. There is no implied obligation on other side to pursue you just because you took on challenge.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#162

Post by masklinn » Fri, Aug 12, 2022, 12:58 PM UTC

Majestic121 wrote: post #98

morelisp wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'

It kinda works still: you tweak the exercise a bit to differentiate between the “in-house” version of the test and the rest.

Depending on the tweak it can also make the most basic of applicants fail to find matches entirely e.g. ask for a “YcomBinator” instead of a “FizzBuzz”.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#163

Post by Victerius » Fri, Aug 12, 2022, 12:58 PM UTC

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #120

sarchertech wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re setting up a gigantic straw man. There are camps on HN who dislike all of those things individually—you can’t just take the union of everything someone here dislikes and call it the HN gestalt. >do something unfun to get hired I don’t know of any other industry who hires senior people the way we do outside of performing arts. I personally don’t mind putting together a portfolio the way most other creative indu…

>I don’t know of any other industry who hires senior people the way we do outside of performing arts. Because nearly every other industry is credentialed, so proving your 3-8 years of university grind is enough to get hired. Outside of tech, any other white collar interview is basically a 15-60 minute coffee or lunch with the boss (the culture fit interview basically) and then, unless you showed some red flags, you g…

This. The popularity of coding bootcamps is another factor.

Software engineers don't like the concept of formal credentials. Fine. But you'll have to demonstrate your skills at one of the interview stages.

Or we could create something like the American Academy of Software Engineers, or the Society of Software Engineers, or the Software Engineering Institute, which would be tasked with accrediting schools and programs, and in order to practice as a software engineer in the industry, on top of a university degree, you'll have to pass another examination from the credentialing authority to obtain a professional title like Professional Software Engineer or Chartered Software Engineer.

Other professions gatekeep before you can take the interview.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#164

Post by manholio » Fri, Aug 12, 2022, 12:58 PM UTC

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…

Or you could just pay people for their time at the prevailing rate, > 50$/h cash.

Here is your homework, we expect someone at your level to spend no more than two days on it, here is your $800, have fun.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#165

Post by BossingAround » Fri, Aug 12, 2022, 12:58 PM UTC

jeremymcanally wrote: post #137

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…

Finally, someone with a sensible position on this. Interviewing sucks, but the people on the other side of the table don't know you or your skillset. You have to give them some sort of objective information to work with. The position I really don't understand are those who think as a "senior" (whatever that means) engineer you should be able to walk in, answer a few questions, and then be hired just because you have…

You can't control for all edge cases in an interview.

Having an interview process exactly like Google won't give your company Google-like engineers.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#166

Post by lr4444lr » Fri, Aug 12, 2022, 12:58 PM UTC

Matticus_Rex wrote: post #143

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I don’t know of any other industry who hires senior people the way we do outside of performing arts. Because nearly every other industry is credentialed, so proving your 3-8 years of university grind is enough to get hired. Outside of tech, any other white collar interview is basically a 15-60 minute coffee or lunch with the boss (the culture fit interview basically) and then, unless you showed some red flags, you g…

> Because nearly every other industry is credentialed, so proving your 3-8 years of university grind is enough to get hired. Nearly every other industry is credentialed and a degree is enough to get hired? I don't think that matches reality at all.

In other white collar professional jobs (not admin), esp. STEM fields, he's not wrong.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#167

Post by im_dario » Fri, Aug 12, 2022, 12:58 PM UTC

I did a home assignment that required far more than 6h. The feedback was atrocious, as they just said "not fit". Not a single comment on what they disliked or how could I improve.

Actually, the assignment was "take this shitty service and make it production-ready". It had some pitfalls that I avoided, and I introduced monitoring, automated deployment, API documentation, etc.

There was a bug - a minor misunderstanding that was simple to fix if they gave the feedback and allowed to do a quick fix - but the rest was production-ready.

I had fun doing it, that's why I didn't mind taking time. What I didn't expect was the poor binary feedback with zero content.

From now on, I'm only taking these assignments if they agree to have a feedback session. If not, I won't do anything. I'm close to 20 years of experience and it feels like they treat me like an undergrad (although I have a full Github profile).

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#168

Post by maeln » Fri, Aug 12, 2022, 12:58 PM UTC

I still think that home assignments can be a good recruiting tool when you are trying to recruit junior, since they can have a very different skill range. For senior it really seems unnecessary.

In both case, if you are going to do home assignment, my question to you is: How good is your offer ? I refused several HA when interviewing with companies because their offers was just not good enough for me to take several hours, on top of the regular interview, to do it. If you do HA, make sure your candidate have a reason to want to take several hours for you.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#169

Post by bambax » Fri, Aug 12, 2022, 12:58 PM UTC

JadoJodo wrote: post #100

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…

There is a strong argument in favor of this, which is engineers spend more time reading code than writing it. It's a very important skill that whiteboard coding doesn't assess at all.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#170

Post by Mo3 » Fri, Aug 12, 2022, 12:58 PM UTC

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…

> There's no way around it.

I never had to