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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

#421

Post by lenocinor »

risyachka wrote: post #315
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…

Most devs have a shit ton of projects, code etc to show. This is way more than enough to estimate skill level and bypass leetcode memorization performances and 90% of other tech elements of interview. Corps basically just offload this work on the candidate as this is obviously cheaper and more convenient, instead of spending time and looking into his profile.

I’ve been professionally coding for two decades and I have exactly zero public code I can show. I know plenty of similar people. You cannot assume people have code to show you.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#422

Post by ipaddr »

CJefferson wrote: post #91
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…

You seem to have rapidly skipped over the exact thing no-one complains about -- a take-home piece of work paid at a reasonable rate. You just claimed people would complain. I've done exactly this, and everyone seemed happy.

It shows you are serious about the candidate and feels like a reasonable level of risk on both sides.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#423

Post by rapht »

bko wrote: post #371
jollyllama wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think it has to do with people the weird phenomenon of people that are working as "programmers" that don't know how to program. This absolutely isn't unique to software. There's plenty of incompetent workers in other fields, like construction workers, bureaucrats, pretty much anything.

Yeah, I've seen it with finance where someone doesn't know how to use Excel or basic finance concepts, but in general they could be taught within a reasonable timeframe. Programming takes many years to become productive. An inexperienced programmer in a code-base is a net negative on the organization. Teaching someone programming on the job is pretty much a non-starter

Teaching someone finance on a tight finance team is not easier -- finance (the real kind, not the automatable kind) is just as technical a field as programming.

What I think is different is that it's not so much deep, like programming can be, as wide -- meaning a skilled interviewer can correlate experience and technicity in a way that gives reasonable assurance.

This is not the case with more junior positions where you need to make sure technicity has actually been acquired by the candidate, lest it be just as you say a "net negative" for the team: for finance positions with less than 10 years of experience, we have a case interview. That case interview is not meant to be selective but just a check of capability. Only candidates that have passed phone screening and hiring manager interview get the case interview, which is also delivered by the hiring manager so gives a chance to see the candidate in another kind of situation.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#424

Post by jjav »

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…

> Apparently the approved HN method

Not that there's an approved method, but the best one IMO (and which I've been using succesfully for 25+ years) is to carefully read the person's resume and have an in-depth conversation about projects they have worked on. No trick questions, no whiteboard memorizations, just a normal conversation about the work they claim in their resume they have done.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#425

Post by lenocinor »

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’ve used a similar interview technique at a previous job and it was great. The candidates and I both generally liked it a lot.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#426

Post by rapht »

naniwaduni wrote: post #212
cableshaft wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Also if that's all someone of his caliber needed to determine applicant quality, I don't see why everyone else feels the need to go through all this other bullshit. 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 accus…

If successful recruiting is not worth some of your best employee-hours -- which by the way should be the same people in charge in their respective fields -- then what is?

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#427

Post by rapht »

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…

This resembles to what we do in a very different field (finance) at my organisation for positions with less than 10 years of experience-- only the prep is time limited, at our offices,

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#428

Post by jjav »

Victerius wrote: post #174
Matticus_Rex wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because nearly every other industry is credentialed, so proving your 3-8 years of university grind is enough to get hired. Nearly every other industry is credentialed and a degree is enough to get hired? I don't think that matches reality at all.

Lawyers need to have passed the bar. Accountants need their CPA. Doctors their MD. Pharmacists their Pharm.D. Finance professionals their CFA. And so on. Software engineers making 150K with only a four year degree and some leetcode have nothing to complain about. Take homes? Whiteboards? Cry me a river. Try to pass the bar or get through residency instead.

> Try to pass the bar or get through residency instead.

It would be wonderful to have an equivalente for computer science. You do it right after graduating, study for it once and you're done. Not leetcoding for 6 months every other year for life which is ridiculous waste of time.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#429

Post by macksd »

rkangel wrote: post #316
macksd wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We had some fairly standard interview questions that I wrote - problem solving type questions asking someone to sketch out a pseudocode answer. One of the smarter things I did was 'interview' several of our existing employees to get an idea of where people would fall on the scale. It was a great help when we then started giving them to candidates, and prevented us hiring some people because no, the good people we had…

This is more or less what we do on my current team. We write out a doc explaining all the common solutions, and what a good candidate should consider and be able to answer, and have a rubric, and we ensure people don't judge candidates until they've shadowed enough that we should have a pretty consistent scale and have made a reasonable effort at being objective.

The downside is some people have barely scraped by in the interview and turned out to be absolute rockstars and day 1, and some people have aced the process and driven everyone else mad with incompetence. So it could be improved.

And maybe that's just on us not writing the perfect questions yet, but a bigger problem is that once we've used a question enough someone will post it online and suddenly a suspicious number of candidates are able to show up and rattle off all 3 optimal solutions in 15 minutes. Weird! I suspect a standardized test approach to software engineers would get this problem even worse.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#430

Post by bko »

rapht wrote: post #423
bko wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I've seen it with finance where someone doesn't know how to use Excel or basic finance concepts, but in general they could be taught within a reasonable timeframe. Programming takes many years to become productive. An inexperienced programmer in a code-base is a net negative on the organization. Teaching someone programming on the job is pretty much a non-starter

Teaching someone finance on a tight finance team is not easier -- finance (the real kind, not the automatable kind) is just as technical a field as programming. What I think is different is that it's not so much deep, like programming can be, as wide -- meaning a skilled interviewer can correlate experience and technicity in a way that gives reasonable assurance. This is not the case with more junior positions where…

I disagree that finance requires the number of hours required to become a competent programmer. I worked in finance, maybe it wasn't the "real kind" or "tight finance", but it was sophisticated. I went into it not knowing much about structured finance and how securitizations work. After reading a few prospectuses, playing around with some models, discounted cash flows, mentoring, etc, I kind of figured it out, enough to be useful at least. I came in with some knowledge (time value of money, interest rates, etc), but those didn't take hundreds of hours to learn either. Screwing up a spreadsheet does not have as bad consequences as pushing bad code to a code-base. Just look at finance spreadsheets the pros use. It's appalling how little care they take (e.g. use of named variables, no version control, insane work-arounds to deal with the limitations of Excel, tolerance for complexity, ridiculous inscrutable formulas, etc).

Junior bankers fresh out of school do the heavy lifting in huge important deals. They get supervision of course and there's a steep learning curve, but the fact is they are in the trenches pretty early on. Senior bankers deal more in relationships and sales. Could you imagine Google hiring junior engineers right out of college to tweak their ad-engine?

Programming on the other hand has taken a lot more time for myself, and pretty much most competent programmers I know. To think about it another way, I don't know anyone in finance that spends hours at home working on side projects learning finance for years. However every competent programmer I know has spent a considerable amount of time outside of the classroom and work honing the craft to reach a basic level of proficiency.

There's a place for junior programmers, but its one of those professions that if you don't truly enjoy it, the payoff in terms of the time you have to spend on it just isn't worth it. And the competition is a lot stiffer. The percentage of finance guys that spend their weekends contributing to open source finance projects, creating educational resources, or answering questions on a stack overflow type platform is much lower when compared to programmers that do this stuff for fun.

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