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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

#361

Post by rubylark »

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 this strategy. After one god awful experience at a company that led me to quitting after 3 months, I will not work for a company that doesn't show me a snippet of their own code. The whole experience at that terrible job could have been avoided if I could see their coding practices: early returns, gotos everywhere in C++, 7(!) different languages that compile into one >1GB executable over the course of an hour. They only did white boarding questions which told them a lot about me, but told me nothing about them.

I've had 4ish interviews since that job, and all of them gave an on-the-spot code reading assignment to walk through their code to find the bugs. It let me see who has old style coding standards, who takes advantage of modern C++ utilities, and that the interviewers are competent enough to walk through coding examples, too.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#362

Post by Tryk »

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 think the issue is more to do with the unpaid aspect rather than the take-home.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#363

Post by rkangel »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #337
rkangel wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My view actually is that most of the world is actually really bad at hiring, and we spend lots of time complaining about the tech world doing it but that's because the tech world tries a lot harder. This is anecdata, but based on talking to my wife and friends who work in other industries most recruitment is pot luck. They interview the candidate for 1 hour, maybe 2, don't have any consistency in what they're asking…

Lots of industries have licensing requirements. My friends that are all of the above (except CEOs), need to have licenses (and often, specific schooling). They work hard for these licenses, and generally have to pass lots of difficult tests. They usually also have to keep working to stay current. The mere thought of doing that, in the tech world, though, brings about collective apoplexy. I'm not especially a fan of h…

The software engineering profession is moving at light speed compared to any of those other careers. It is specific to us and not engineering as a whole too - as you point out, structural engineering does have qualifications required (chartered status).

Medicine does move on, but a lot of what a doctor needs to do doesn't. And the bits that do are actually a problem with there not being a good way of ensuring that doctors use up to date techniques.

The difference is that structural engineers and doctors are safeguarding safety, and (most) software engineers aren't. If someone suggested people should need chartered status to work on medical device software I don't think that would be as controversial, and will get progressively less so as the discipline is less brand new and progress slows down a bit.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#364

Post by mathverse »

buf wrote: post #308

I wrote an article about this same thing. Stop interviewing with ad-hoc code quizzes, live or take-home. I've interviewed maybe 500 engineers in my career. I'm an early engineer of Instacart, 3rd engineer of Eventbrite, founding engineer of Reforge. Started 3 companies myself. My interview is always the same: 1. Bring code you've written 2. Share your screen 3. Explain what it does and I will casually ask questions a…

The thing is I dont even have a problem with a take home assignment as a method to validate some skills.

I just detest the practice of not giving anything in return for the time you have invested in doing the assignment. I would not complain about this if candidates received good fedback.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#365

Post by lapcat »

yCombLinks wrote: post #360
lapcat wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you're not putting families at risk which you would by hiring people to fire them with pretty high odds. I'm not sure what you mean by putting families at risk?

Getting fired from a job when you are providing for a family is a very precarious situation to be in. You're family is put at risk when you are fired.

I was tring to give hawk_ the benefit of the doubt by not assuming that's what was meant, because it seems like a very bizarre concern to me, given that hawk_ was talking about "incompetent people".

Incompetent people put their own families at risk by trying to work in an industry where they're incompetent. It's not the responsibility of employers in that industry to provide for the families of people who can't do the job. It's really a bizarre concern to be worried about the families of fakers. Moreover, how would it be better for the family of a fake for companies to not hire them at all, as opposed to hiring and inevitably firing them? In either case they'll be unemployed ultimately, but at least if they get hired and fired they can pick up some paychecks, so that's actually better for their families, if that's what we care about here.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#366

Post by mathverse »

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?

It's odd to me that you have completely misunderstood what is the problem here. It's not the take home assignment that is the problem but the asymmetric relationship and toxic practices.

I invest 6h of my time as a highly paid engineer to do a home assignment and at best I receive a reply "sorry we found a candidate that's a better fit?".

That's what's unacceptable.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#367

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

rkangel wrote: post #363
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of industries have licensing requirements. My friends that are all of the above (except CEOs), need to have licenses (and often, specific schooling). They work hard for these licenses, and generally have to pass lots of difficult tests. They usually also have to keep working to stay current. The mere thought of doing that, in the tech world, though, brings about collective apoplexy. I'm not especially a fan of h…

The software engineering profession is moving at light speed compared to any of those other careers. It is specific to us and not engineering as a whole too - as you point out, structural engineering does have qualifications required (chartered status). Medicine does move on, but a lot of what a doctor needs to do doesn't. And the bits that do are actually a problem with there not being a good way of ensuring that do…

But I think anyone that handles PID should be held to account, as to what happens to that data. We have been doing a terrible job of that.

Many apps that I encounter, are pretty much bald-faced, unapologetic, data harvesters. That’s clearly their main purpose, and their stated purpose is really just the lure on an anglerfish.

“Move fast and break things” sounds good, until you realize that said “things” may be people’s lives.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#368

Post by Balgair »

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.

How many interviews are you doing?

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#369

Post by didgetmaster »

I once did an interview with a company that wanted me to do a homework assignment. It was obvious from the problem that it wasn't just a way to find out if you could code, but was a real problem the company was facing.

I spent a couple hours on it, but I realized that in order to get it working and tested, it would require many more hours of work. I started peppering the code with comments like /* here I would verify the validity of the data by doing X */ to show them I knew what needed to be done without doing all the grunt work.

I sent the code, but the manager got back to me and said he expected finished code that actually worked and not just pseudo code. I politely told him that I would gladly do the work if he wanted to pay me my fee I usually charge for contract work.

He declined so the company did not get a bunch of free consulting work, which I think was the point of the exercise. Too many companies get away with this.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#370

Post by VoodooJuJu »

ProjectArcturis wrote: post #334
VoodooJuJu wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Think about the systemic problems that would arise if it were customary to pay applicants for the interview. You'd immediately have application farms spamming out fake resumes. They'd bomb the actual interview but collect $100+ each time.

I'm not asking to be paid for the interview, I'm asking to be paid for doing contract work.
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