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

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#291

Post by VoodooJuJu » Fri, Aug 12, 2022, 1:32 PM UTC

lbreakjai wrote: post #135

We let the candidates decide: Take-home assignment, pair-programming, or we go through an existing project of theirs, discuss it, and extend it together. The take-home assignment is short. It shouldn't take more than an hour if you really really want it to be polished, which we heavily insist we do not care about. The overall process is a bit longer, because we then discuss it together. For the pair programming sessi…

>Take-home assignment

That's fine, pay me.

>pair-programming

Again, that's fine, pay me.

>go through an existing project of theirs, discuss it, and extend it together

The SaaS's I own and operate are closed-source and I'm not looking to take on any contractors at this time, but I'll let you know if anything opens up.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#292

Post by dudul » Fri, Aug 12, 2022, 1:32 PM UTC

sf_rob wrote: post #179

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. Th…

That's interesting because as a hiring manager I get a lot of push back on our take-home since it does cut you off after a certain amount of time. Our take home shouldn't take more than 90/120minutes, we give candidates up to 4 hours just because some really like to polish, but then that's it. I don't want them to spend more of their spare time on that.

The feedback is usually "well, but I want to make sure I can take all the time I need!".

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#293

Post by joe8756438 » Fri, Aug 12, 2022, 1:33 PM UTC

I’ve been on both sides of the table, big company and small. The common interview practices, and the one brought up by OP, stem from a desire to have a system that doesn’t rely on trusting the candidate.

I think this is a bad place to start. But how do you weed out people misrepresenting their ability? I think it’s a lot easier than most realize: first you need _something_ to talk about, have the candidate bring something they worked on. Then ask a ton of questions. Not just technical questions, questions about motivation, interest, reasoning, and taste.

The argument against this is that not everyone has time to make something on their own time and it just shifts the privilege to those with a greater share of free time. I think there is something to that, BUT: the power to choose the subject is in the hands of the candidate not the interviewer, that to eliminate all the test-like processes seems like a fair trade.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#294

Post by shagie » Fri, Aug 12, 2022, 1:33 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #248

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…

And if you've been working on proprietary things for those 20 years and don't work on your own open projects at home--as would be considered utterly unremarkable if you were a chemical engineer for example--you wouldn't have a portfolio. Yes, if you're a photographer I'd expect to see a portfolio. But that's not true for basically the majority of technical, scientific, and business fields.

The chemical engineer has an engineering degree. They are possibly also a professional engineer. To retain the PE license, continuing education is a requirement.

> Chemical engineers must, on average, complete 15 hours of technically focused continuing education courses each year. State requirements vary, and some also require courses on ethics, state engineering laws, or professional behavior. Acceptable formats include online courses, live webinars, seminars, and college courses.

So while the PE doesn't have a personal portfolio, they do have a professional one, the tests that they've passed to reach that and the continuing education completion certificates.

The "do things at home" is a way to get a similar type of value as the PE has for continuing education... but not as any formal way of stating it because software development hasn't come up with a good way to do licensure.

So, for all those other technical, scientific, medical, and yes, business fields (the 'C' part of a CPA) which do have licensure, this is a solved problem.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#295

Post by mathverse » Fri, Aug 12, 2022, 1:35 PM UTC

vhodges wrote: post #240

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…

Here's why we're going to start doing a take home project as part of the hiring process: Last fall I hired a supposed senior dev with 10+ years of experience and watched them struggle for the next 4 months with the most basic things. At first I though it was our codebase (large, mature and complex), but it became pretty clear they had mis-represented them selves. The fault is ours of course, they should never have be…

People seem to argue about the wrong things. I am not advocating for abolishing the practice of take home assignments. Far from it.

However it has become a common practice to require from applicants unreasonable amount of time to complete said assignments without any commitmet from the company. That's just toxic.

This would not have been such a big problem if companies provided decent feedback on what went wrong with your assignment.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#296

Post by ghaff » Fri, Aug 12, 2022, 1:36 PM UTC

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…

There used to be a PE for software engineering in the US. It got eliminated because basically no one got it. Though, to be fair, PEs are relatively uncommon outside of civil engineering and people who do a lot of expert witness work/signoff for regulatory authorities and so forth. Typically PEs require an undergrad degree and some number of years in industry working under a licensed engineer.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#297

Post by pierot » Fri, Aug 12, 2022, 1:37 PM UTC

sarchertech wrote: post #213

pierot wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of companies perform rigorous assessment tests for high profile or high paying jobs. IT is not the exception.

Generally only for new grads.

Not at all. People coming from different industries or stepping into a new type of function description in a different company.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#298

Post by LocalPCGuy » Fri, Aug 12, 2022, 1:37 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…

We've done this with real-world PRs from our code base (chosen from a project that matches the job they are interviewing for), especially for more senior devs it is good to see how they parse through the code, what they look for, comments they make, and how they communicate.

The one thing I didn't feel just asking for review/discussion accounted well for was their ability to build/add something new to the code, and so we have followed up the code review/discussion with a very specific/small exercise to evaluate the process (architecture, pseudo-code) they'd use to do that, and then discuss that as well.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#299

Post by lapcat » Fri, Aug 12, 2022, 1:37 PM UTC

drawkbox wrote: post #280

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…

Contract to hire is the way to go, even if a short time. Most jobs are like that anyways, the first weeks/months are still part of the hiring process. This tests the worker in the actual environment. The contract could even be remote and sectioned off from the larger enterprise, just like any contractors added currently. The important part of contract-to-hire is it shows how the person will communicate while working,…

> Going straight to full employment is like going from strangers to marriage

Not when employment is at-will.

It's more like going from one date or few dates (depending on the length of the "interview process") to an exclusive relationship, which happens all the time. And non-marriage relationships are also at-will, so they can end quickly if necessary.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#300

Post by fsloth » Fri, Aug 12, 2022, 1:38 PM UTC

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…

Generally companies succeed in hiring by filtering resumes and interviewing candidates. That's it.

It's weird if a company feels it needs to do more than that.

Companies either have trial periods or can let go of non-performing personnel. Hiring is critical but I've not seen any study that would correlate "high scores" in any type of hiring test to actual work performance.

This implies no matter how elaborate interview performances are orchestrated, their capability to do anything else except create false negatives increases as their complexity increases.

Hiring, in essence, is always a gating process with very little predictive capability beyond. The only thing you can know is the percentage of new hires who fail at their duties, and if that percentage is oddly high, you realize there is a problem in your hiring process.

I suppose you can gauge candidate agreeableness and conformity by subjecting them to all sorts of hazing procedures but in our field I don't see how that translates to good outcomes either - technically speaking. Might be good for creating cult enclaves, though, for lonely gurus.

I was a bit tongue in cheek here but my opinion "less is better" holds as it comes to hiring practices - this does not imply lack of diligence from the part of the hiring manager.