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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

#181

Post by sarchertech »

Victerius wrote: post #174
Matticus_Rex wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Lawyers need to have passed the bar. Accountants need their CPA. Doctors their MD. Pharmacists their Pharm.D. Finance professionals their CFA. And so on. Software engineers making 150K with only a four year degree and some leetcode have nothing to complain about. Take homes? Whiteboards? Cry me a river. Try to pass the bar or get through residency instead.

Those jobs are a minority of white collar office jobs.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#182

Post by rr888 »

preommr wrote: post #147

> It took me about 6h to develop and iron out the edge cases. This is where you messed up. Set a hard limit of 1-2 hours, and mention edge cases in your comments and move on. It also depends on the stage of the interview. If you're in the early stages then they probably just want to see that you know what you're doing, and it should be fairly fast with the right frameworks, scaffolding, starters, etc.

Yeah I haven't done this enough to be confident to stop after an hour. Usually there is a lot of experimenting with different designs, adding tests, refactoring, tidying up - I'd think a day for a "1 hour" exercise is normal.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#183

Post by smoe »

jerf wrote: post #127
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…

"You’re setting up a gigantic straw man." And called it the HN gestalt. Pretty sure I labelled it with what it is right up front. Nevertheless, I do think there are quite a few individuals who have an unexamined (in the philosophical sense) assumption that they just shouldn't have to do anything to get hired. I bet most of them, if they examined it, would realize that it's not a sensible assumption. I think it sneaks…

I haven't met many people that think they shouldn't do anything, what I see more commonly, is people assuming the way they personally prefer getting evaluated is the way it should be for everyone.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#184

Post by bko »

sarchertech wrote: post #111
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’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.

I think it has to do with people the weird phenomenon of people that are working as "programmers" that don't know how to program. I've seen a few. I've seen people write C on their resume and I gave them an hour for an easy assignment with the language of their choice, and they couldn't even get anything to compile. The guy probably read a book on C a decade ago or took a C class in college. Me on the other hand, I had python on my resume although I never worked in python or any programming language, but I studied the hell out of it in my free time. It was difficult for me to get my first programming job, so I like this model more. Trust but verify

Another reason is that there is a lot of variability in programming jobs. A programmer or developer in one company may consist of changing a few lines of code in a project they don't understand all the way to architecting the infrastructure the whole organization relies on. It's difficult to parse out the two from just an interview.

If you're hiring an actuary, and they had worked as an actuary before, you're probably pretty certain the work is similar enough, and if they hadn't been fired then they're at least somewhat competent.

I like simple programming problems, something slightly harder than foobar, ideally industry specific. Show them you know how to get a programming environment setup, know how to create functions, for loops, classes if appropriate and basic control flow. With the technical stuff out of the way you can review the candidates work experience

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#185

Post by alistairSH »

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…

How do companies hire paralegals, staff accountants (no CPA), various business consultants, HR, marketing staff, etc? In my entire peer group, only the software engineers have ridiculously time-consuming take-home tests.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#186

Post by sarchertech »

Victerius wrote: post #163
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…

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…

The vast majority of working engineers don’t bother with PE certifications.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#187

Post by jdthedisciple »

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…

I really like your approach and wish more employers employed it (haHaa). As an applicant I'd certainly appreciate it.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#188

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#189

Post by macksd »

bambax wrote: post #152
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…

The problem with tech recruiting is that each company does its own, and so job seekers repeat the process many times with different employers. There should be some kind of test that would be recognized by the industry, that you could attempt once every six months for example, and that would positively assess your ability to code. You would get a score that you could show to recruiters (if you wished to). Some recruit…

You're basically describing HackerRank, and I've worked with some pretty terrible engineers who were very proud of their HackerRank credentials.

Write such a test. Give it to all the engineers whose work you know well, and see if it can accurately predict what they brought to your team. I would be very surprised if you could both spot good talent and dead weights reliably.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#190

Post by vitno »

datalopers wrote: post #50

It’s odd to me how people complain so much about being asked to write code (whiteboard, take-home, leetcode puzzles) in order to land a coding job. Is a prospective employer supposed to suss this out entirely through verbal questions?

I don't think people are complaining about writing code, I think they are complaining about the time involved with take homes (just having done a couple I can empathize with) and whiteboard codings "high stress nature".

I've also had interviews which just talk about work I've done before. Most industries only need that, and I'm coming around to those being the more valuable questions.

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