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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

#221

Post by mathverse »

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…

Trying to get an objective information to work with is fine. Expecting someone to work for free without any committment / investment from the company is TOXIC.

I have a friend who set the expectations upfront (working from home) and was told it might not be a problem, finished the whole ordeal of take home assignments and technical rounds. The company liked him but he was told WFH is not acceptable (hello Tencent).

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#223

Post by brodouevencode »

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 so much strawmanning and sarcasm in this response.

I love it.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#224

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#225

Post by hyperman1 »

Long ago, I had a candidate in an interview for a short term project. The person had an important hole in his knowledge, but seemed OK apart from that. I was afraid learning the knowledge required to fill the hole would take too much time from the short term project.

So I decided to mail a take home assignment. I took about an hour myself to prepare it, the assignment was not work related, it was a completely fictional task. I think it was creating a HTML page of ~50 lines demonstrating the hole could be filled if the person had access to internet and all relevant docs. The person delivered the next work day, did well, and we hired.

I've thought long and hard about this, and decided the assignment was a mistake and I would not do it again (sorry to the person in question). Why? In practice, when listening an hour to a candidate and let them write a minimum of code, you know if you have a complete weirdo who never touched a computer, or someone who is at least basically OK. In this case, it was a short term job, so the blast radius was pretty small even if candidate was bad. For longer term engagements, there is generally a test period and better vetting available. Meanwhile, I was in a position of power over someone else, and while the whole thing seemed minor to me at the time, I later heard the (junior) candidate was worried sick and spent way to much time on the assignment.

An underlying cause for my mistake was the interview situation, which was very bad. Basically, I was in the middle of something else, and a project lead I had never heard of for a project I had never head of asked me to do a technical interview while the candidate I had never heard of was already sitting in a meeting room. Needless to say, I was completely unprepared. There wasn't even a whiteboard in the meeting room. So I basically adjusted by always being prepared for surprise candidates: A list of questions for most common technologies and a template for technically grading candidates were always stashed away in my locker from then on, and the people starting projects would keep us interviewers in the loop when a job would open.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#227

Post by saxonww »

sarchertech wrote: post #157
jerf wrote: post #127

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.”

Sure you can. They are not trying to make the point that no food is edible, they are trying to make a point that depending on who you ask, you will end up hearing that any and every type of food is inedible.

I get what they are saying. If you read the comment threads here on interview experiences, you're going to encounter groups that dislike or want to forbid every kind of technical screening technique. It's easy to read comments here and come away thinking nothing is OK and everything is unfair.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#228

Post by wahnfrieden »

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.

you're also filtering out people with the skills but who don't want to do bs unpaid busy-work for you (maybe what you're after). ethical action goes both ways

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#229

Post by conformist »

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…

Somewhat off-topic: I'm a native German speaker and I'm really struggling to understand what "Gestalt" is supposed to mean in contemporary English usage.

Like, "Zeitgeist" seems to be used like I would in German (although far more frequently).

What am I missing? Is there some subtle difference in meaning via Yiddish or similar?

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#230

Post by bambax »

macksd wrote: post #189
bambax wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It doesn't have to be perfect, it just needs to be better than the tech part of the current interview system. I very much doubt that whiteboard interviews can accurately predict what people bring to a team; they're not even designed to assess that.

This system wouldn't replace the personality interviews, etc., but only measure technical abilities.

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