211–220 of 470 posts
The only companies that asked me to do a take home are ones with horrible, unprepared interviews where it was clear interviewers were just kinda talking and feeling around for... something.
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 had a similar interview once. They asked me to bring in a code sample, we discussed what it did and various details around it, then he showed me an actual class in their codebase (printed out), asked me to explain figure out and explain everything it did, and there was also a couple mistakes included in the code for me to find as well. The guy also asked me a few relatively simple technical questions, then said "Ok…
Flipping it around, it takes someone of that caliber to be able to determine applicant quality with just that. Can we replicate it without having to spend some of your most valuable employee-hours, let alone in a way that doesn't leave you open to accusations of all sorts of bias?
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…
Lots of companies perform rigorous assessment tests for high profile or high paying jobs. IT is not the exception.
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…
My post was not meant to imply that home assignments are a wrong tool to filter out candidates.
It's how it is conducted that makes it a toxic practice. Not providing any meaningful feedback or not paying for a work that takes too much time is what makes it not acceptable.
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…
Take-homes exist because companies suck at interviewing tech workers. It should be enough to simply review some code while on a call.
Companies should hire senior engineer consultants to do technical interviews. A staff engineer with 15+ years experience can suss out how good another engineer is in 1.5 hrs.
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…
Then I got grilled in the interview for not pulling in all sorts of bloat and other bullshit for a single endpoint CRUD app.
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…
One swift interview process I did included a single short page of code and the invitation to (with pen and paper) review it; I was given some time to think about it on my own and then to talk it over with the technical interviewer.
I liked that one and they had what I thought was an above average quality of developer when I joined. Anecdotal but interesting.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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…
Labeling it it as a the HN gestalt doesn’t mean that it’s not a straw man. You can’t take the union of everyone’s food dislikes and say “according to the Earth gestalt, no food is edible.”
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…
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…
I don’t understand how this is hard. I’ve hired dozens of engineers in the last 10 years. I’ve never needed to resort to any google level leetcode tactics. It’s never made sense to me if the goal is to hire a quality software engineer that can get the job done. Maybe that’s not the goal for companies that make interviewees do this performative bullshit.