Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

You get a lot of signals with the approach described below that are highly indicative of how the candidate is going to perform on the job. With a take-home assignment, you get no signals that can predict their on the job performance.

-----

For engineering roles where the person is expected to write copious amounts of code to ship functional features everyday, a 2.5-hour machine coding round to assess coding competency (as part of an interview loop that also has other rounds for problem-solving, data-structures/algorithms, high-level systems design and low-level design) is standard in multiple companies I have seen (and advocated for). While coding round is a strong filter, it is important to assess the interaction of the candidate in these other rounds that are non-coding but designing/problem-solving rounds, especially in high functional domain complexity industry like e-commerce or payments etc.

In the machine coding round, the candidate should be given a well-defined written problem statement (from an internal question bank of well-calibrated problem statements) along with test inputs and a few test outputs, and in the first 5 minutes ask them to read the problem and ask any clarifying questions. Then leave them be with a dev machine for next hour. If they choose to, 10 minutes in, they can discuss the approach they are going to take with you. Then after an hour, you can discuss if they have a working code that passes the test inputs. If yes, you can give them an enhancement/modification to make. and leave them be for another 45 minutes. Then, take the last 30 minutes to discuss the solution they have come up with and understand their thinking style w.r.t coding conventions, style etc. If they couldn't complete the enhancement, discuss a potential solution (give a hint) with them and see if they can tackle it. Write calibrated/standardized evaluation notes for your interaction so that others (hiring panel) can understand and decide. Existing engineers inside the company should have tried the problem statements themselves and calibrated to see if the problem is meaningfully solvable in the allotted time.

I on the other hand would love, LOVE, a take home, I ask for them every time and companies won’t offer them. I don’t excel under the pressure of a 1hr interview and at the staff+ level they expect you to display all sorts of architectural skills that I fin much easier to display not under pressure and not in under 1hr. I wish somebody would compile a list of companies that offer take home even!

I'll counter your straw man with a bit of another... the rest of the white collar world largely gets by without take-home assignments or similar.

For example, my wife is an organization development consultant, she's changed jobs a few times over the last 12 years, and never has she had a take-home test. Instead, she has a few rounds of interviews, typically starting with a hiring VP, followed by an SVP or executive, and possibly a panel interview with possible peers. They talk about her previous work in detail, digging into frameworks she's used, papers she's read, etc. And then relate that work to the open position.

Personally, I've had reasonable success talking through a basic system design problem. Depending on the candidate's experience level, I can focus on different aspects of the problem... overall design, performance & algorithms, eventual layout of services/components in AWS, etc.

The real issue here that nobody talks about: there are just too many people wanting to become programmers. And I mean this in the most sincere way: we need to understand most developers aren't seeking to do programming for intrinsic fun or to create something that helps other people, they do them to earn a livable wage. Programming jobs are the only type of technical job left that actually pays shit (well enough to buy a house and start a family), so each year more and more are trying to hack interviews applying for 6-figure jobs that provide at least a reasonable middle-class life nowadays. So here goes accelerated hyper-competition... Obviously the real solution for this is to abolish wage work (so people actually only do programming that is useful or fun), but many here on HN would think of this as unrealistic, so there's that.

I'd be okay with "homework" if either 1) it's truly time bounded via programmatic cutoffs or 2) it's paid.

For time bounding, I love the time estimates they give you for a decent sized problem. A major company told me that a feature extraction problem + report should only take 4 hours. They provided me with some large CSVs representing DB tables (which contained some malformed data) and wanted a brief report back.

That's unrealistic in 4 hours even for a great performer. Then you spend the weekend on it and they won't give you feedback on it because of the suits in legal.

It's disrespectful.