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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

#441

Post by antisthenes »

im_dario wrote: post #167

I did a home assignment that required far more than 6h. The feedback was atrocious, as they just said "not fit". Not a single comment on what they disliked or how could I improve. Actually, the assignment was "take this shitty service and make it production-ready". It had some pitfalls that I avoided, and I introduced monitoring, automated deployment, API documentation, etc. There was a bug - a minor misunderstanding…

Making something production-ready is not a take-home assignment, certainly not part of an interview process.

Full stop.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#443

Post by buildbot »

sarchertech wrote: post #277
buildbot wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, when I was an undergrad looking for internships, I interviewed at Blue Origin for some embedded role and was asked to draw an simple RC circuit. I was super nervous and forgot the symbol for a capacitor, and just told my interviewer that and made one up. I did not get an offer from them (luckily, in retrospect)

Notice that this was for an internship. This kind of thing is commune for new grads, not people with experience.

Fair enough, I would not know as I ended up in ML research instead haha.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#444

Post by lapcat »

hawk_ wrote: post #433
lapcat wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

The quotes on incompetent was missing. If someone's set at a place and proves to be "incompetent" in another setting their family is better off if they never switched the job in the first place. Hiring someone with 5/10+ years of experience for example and firing them after trial is a worse outcome for most people than not having had them make the switch in the first place if it was avoidable.

This is conflating 2 different situations:

(1) Competent programmer who isn't a good fit for a particular job.

(2) Incompetent programmer, the "can't code, can't even write a for loop" bogeyman that seems to scare everyone.

Coding interviews — whiteboarding, take-home projects, and the like — are intended to filter out (2). But they aren't good at filtering out (1).

(1) can always occur. There's not a great way of avoiding that until they actually get on the job. Of course it's unpleasant to fire somehow who doesn't work out, but I don't see how take-home assignments are supposed to help here with (1). Whereas the (2) people shouldn't be in the industry at all, and they're lucky to somehow scam someone into giving them a job, but the industry should not be financially supporting scammers or their families.

I'm personally not convinced that (2) is as big a group as many people believe it is.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#445

Post by mr-yamasi »

VoodooJuJu wrote: post #438
mr-yamasi wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before I agree to pay you for contract work, I need you to do an assessment proving that you are worth being paid for your contract work.

>Before I hire you to install a new roof on my house, I need you to install a portion of the roof to prove to me that you're good enough to pay to install a roof. It even sounds absurd. With this kind of attitude, you'll end up having to do your own roofing. Self-respecting men don't work for free. For prospective software employees: stop granting hiring managers absurd entitlements - do not work for free. This indus…

Let's not get caught up in metaphors and analogies...but if you install a terrible roof, you don't get a dime you until you fix the leaks.

If you come develop for me and do nothing but cry that you can't do a proper slice append in go and you need us to change our stack to elixir because you're used to it, all I get is a fight with HR for 3 months getting a paper trail together to fire you while I pay you $40k.

Not to mention there's a whole sales model of household appliances where they very much come in and demonstrate the value of their vacuum before they sell you on one...

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#446

Post by satisfice »

The headline is wrong. You should have said “Unpaid… are not ok for ME.”

Maybe someone else is more hungry, more ambitious, more game than you. They deserve their shot.

When I have given assignments like this, I said “the result of this work belongs to you. You can show it to any prospective employer. In fact, if you can show me a portfolio of your work, then you do not need to do this assignment.”

(I hire testers, and they rarely have examples of their testing work to show off.)

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#447

Post by morelisp »

antisthenes wrote: post #439
wahnfrieden wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Those people are free to evaluate existing GitHub solutions and pick the working one (out of the 20% ones, presumably). That's way faster than writing unpaid working code and shows you're competent AND efficient.

Also, if they do that, I'll happily bring the original writer of the code to the interview to probe them on the flaws, as we hired most of them. :)

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#448

Post by strokirk »

sarchertech wrote: post #249
saxonww wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That’s not the point they are are making at all. They further expanded on this by talking about the straw man hacker news user who doesn’t think they should have to do anything to get hired.

It's the exact point they are making. The union of all dislikes and eloquently put putdowns is exactly what many of us bring with us in our heads every day.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#449

Post by edanm »

LocalPCGuy wrote: post #201
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…

> quite a few individuals who ... that they just shouldn't have to do anything to get hired THAT is your strawman. I would question that this is a "common" assumption - most everyone, when pressed, understands there is some need for an interview and some form of evaluation of skills. They may push back on specific mentions as one person already mentioned, but almost everyone falls in a middle ground where it's someth…

I've been in software long enough to know that these criticisms of the prices aren't new. And a lot of the things people complain about are improvements on the past, and came about precisely because old ways of hiring were leading to people who couldn't code (hence things like the whiteboard interview)

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#450

Post by edanm »

fsloth wrote: post #300
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…

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 intervi…

> 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.

There definitely are such studies. I don't have citations here, but it's well known that IQ tests or work-sample tasks are both the most effective at predicting on job performance.

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