Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

1. set up a good GitHub (or other) profile; convince potential employers to look at that rather than test you (I've done this - it can work) 2. if a company still insists you "do the test", then either your GH is too sparse (spruce it up!) or they're full of shit - but you have another data point to work with 3. even the most trivial "toy project" test could be 1 hr for one person and 6hr for another, so what's unreasonable for you may be totally reasonable for the level they're aiming at

Well... ya know. Things have been weird lately.

My wife and I bought 20 months ago with me making 39k and her making upper 40k. We bought this house with zero down at 170k and it's now estimated at 240-250k per the mortgage company and Zillow. We have about 1200sqft on the ground floor then about 1200 in the basement with a little over half of an acre, we're 30 minutes outside of Indy. House is 1960s.

A new construction house in Plainfield, immediately adjacent to Indy, you get 2 bed, 2 bath, 2 car garage, basically no yard with the house at 1504 sqft is starting at 290k right now and can get a 3 bed with similar sqft for closer to 300k. If you picked the neighborhood well, and were ok with not having the latest and greatest features, a single person could still probably pull a mortgage in a safer neighborhood without issue.

>somewhere around 40k ~ 50k? (which is what high school teachers in the area seem to earn

So this varies wildly. My wife was getting the higher end of that at the rural school she was teaching at, she's moved one school district over and took a considerable pay bump - mind you she has like 12~ years of experience, and once she finishes her masters she'll get a 4-5k pay bump at her next (annual) contract renewal automatically.

Formal credentialing generally means you demonstrate "I can do this", in a very drawn-out, thorough manner. It's gatekeeping more, but there's a much larger guarantee for your creds to be transferrable from place to place.

In software engineering, you demonstrate "I can do this", in a several-round bout of interviews. And then have to demonstrate it all over again and again, for every single company. Your interview performance is non-transferrable.

My opinion is, the latter is more wasteful as it involves repeating yourself a whole lot.

The former has a higher upfront cost but you are betting in the long run that it will amortize over time as you continue to go on interviews.

The latter has less upfront cost but a greater chance of creating more cost in the long run, depending on how much you interview and where.

OP spent 6 hours- personally I wouldn't spend that much on any assignment, but the bigger issue here is that 6 hours is only valid for one company. Interview "work" is so proprietary and non-transferrable- like currency that is useless outside that one company. You cannot take what you did there and show it elsewhere to expedite an interview. You will have to run through another several-hour process again (whether interviewing or another assignment), for some other variation of a CRUD based problem that they expect developers to do.

I suppose the closest thing we have to avoiding repetition is- the answer many won't like- Leetcode. You still have to navigate through opinionated views of your answers, but at least there are more patterns that carry over that its benefits compound more easily from interview to interview.

They are useful in that they at least convey a tiny bare minimum level of skill--something many, many software engineering candidates lack. Passing the bar exam for lawyers and the medical board exam for doctors signals at least some minimal knowledge and qualification. They don't tell you the professional's whole story, but enough to allow you to skip the "Where is the patient's knee?" interview questions.

Software desperately need at least some "barest minimum" gate that lets interviewers at least skip the Fizzbuzz questions.