71–80 of 190 posts
Why would I do any of these? They are a huge time sink and I have plenty of job opportunities without jump through these hoops.
at least with a take-home exercise, i can take my time, do in a few hours, without the pressure of having someone looking at what i'm doing.
Give candidates real work & pay them for their time. https://blog.algora.io/post/2022-04-pay-when-hiring-part-2/
He calls it a "Ride Along": top candidates spend a day of coding with his team and receive $500. How do you figure out if they're top candidates? First we did screening & technical interviews to arrive at our 5-10 most promising candidates Right, so we're back at square one doing "technical interviews" again.
We shared a hiring bounty with a dozen applicants purely based on their resumes, never spoke with anyone on the phone, received 5 PRs, awarded & hired 3 of them.
As an interviewer, I believe take home tasks are unfair and also poor return on investment. Take home tasks incentivise candidates to burn as much time as possible on the task. Consequently, they are a test of who is willing to put a week of work even when the instructions say it should not take more than 3 hours to complete. I prefer pair programming with the candidate on the premise that if I ask you to spend 2 hou…
The two things I like about them from a candidate perspective are that they're async, and that they generally have an actual problem to solve, rather than "solve N-Queens." Some companies (Dropbox comes to mind) have coding tests, but they're async, and they also aren't convoluted Leetcode problems. I've also interviewed people using both live and a take-home review, and don't have much of a preference there. If the…
I applied to Dropbox some years ago, and the coding test was an NP-hard problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rectangle_packing
As there are no tests rated 1 star, I wonder if the scoring is too lax. I've taken some of these – shocked that Algolia's made it to a 3 star. Look at how much work this is: https://github.com/algolia/solutions-hiring-assignment
That's an absurd amount of work to do for free. Plus, it is useless: You won't learn anything new, it is going to impact no one, and it is going to sit stale at the inbox of 2 senior developers for 2 weeks until it is seen, as a chore. This vicious cycle of wasting time must stop.
Also, WTF is this about?:
> Important: Do not fork this repository to create your assignment. Doing so will wake a bot that prints out your code, immediately sends it to the shredder, and archives your application in our applicant tracking system. And anyway we’d rather give everyone an equal shot to show us what they can do.
They want you to host it on GH Pages later on in the instructions, so what's the point of this restriction?
As an interviewer, I believe take home tasks are unfair and also poor return on investment. Take home tasks incentivise candidates to burn as much time as possible on the task. Consequently, they are a test of who is willing to put a week of work even when the instructions say it should not take more than 3 hours to complete. I prefer pair programming with the candidate on the premise that if I ask you to spend 2 hou…
(I'll note that I have no problem pairing in real-world work scenarios! I love discussing problems with my team. It's the artificial pressure injected by the interview process that really gets to me)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Counter-Point. If the assignment is properly sized: no more than an hour. Then the candidate doing it at home using their system and their tools gives you a more accurate picture of their actual capabilities than a whiteboard or doing it on your hardware in an unfamiliar setting with a stranger giving every appearance of critiquing your work. This is an interview after all. The power balance whether intended or not i…
I like this concept - have a one time download link, and a timer to submit solution within an hour or two. Seems like a good balance of fair and realistic (assuming you can't Google for solutions and all).
I will never understand the desire to handicap interviewees like that. I recently passed an live-coding interview in which I was asked to use an unfamiliar library; bc it was open-book I was able to look up its docs and use it to solve the problem. At one point I also hopped onto MDN to confirm a browser API. The ability to search and effectively leverage available resources is fundamental to our profession. Closed-book "pop quiz"-style puzzles -- where the surface area of the relevant material is unbelievably vast, and the relevance of the problem to the job's requisite skills is tenuous at best -- are highly problematic.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
He calls it a "Ride Along": top candidates spend a day of coding with his team and receive $500. How do you figure out if they're top candidates? First we did screening & technical interviews to arrive at our 5-10 most promising candidates Right, so we're back at square one doing "technical interviews" again.
That's just how Thomas at Cloudthread.io run his process, he used real paid work for his final hiring decision. It's not the only way. We personally (Algora.io founders) jumped straight into paid work without prior interviews. We shared a hiring bounty with a dozen applicants purely based on their resumes, never spoke with anyone on the phone, received 5 PRs, awarded & hired 3 of them.
If you're only paying the people you hire, that's not paying people for their time.
I mean sorry, but if you did a good job, we're going to make you an offer such that you won't need to quibble about $500. The entire difficult part is what you're asking from people you don't hire!
As an interviewer, I believe take home tasks are unfair and also poor return on investment. Take home tasks incentivise candidates to burn as much time as possible on the task. Consequently, they are a test of who is willing to put a week of work even when the instructions say it should not take more than 3 hours to complete. I prefer pair programming with the candidate on the premise that if I ask you to spend 2 hou…
> I can learn more about you working with you for half an hour than I would ever learn by studying the code That's the problem. I think everyone is too focused on technical prowess and forgetting something just as important which is written documentation and explanation. Pair programming has the downside of selecting people with good interpersonal skills and will tell you nothing about quality of code delivered. A go…
>and will tell you nothing about quality of code delivered.
These statements seem a little contradictory or I'm misunderstanding the context.
As an interviewer, I believe take home tasks are unfair and also poor return on investment. Take home tasks incentivise candidates to burn as much time as possible on the task. Consequently, they are a test of who is willing to put a week of work even when the instructions say it should not take more than 3 hours to complete. I prefer pair programming with the candidate on the premise that if I ask you to spend 2 hou…