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Three hundred programming interviews in thirty days

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Re: Three hundred programming interviews in thirty days

#101

Post by ruswick »

geebee wrote: post #39
protonfish wrote: post #6

It's great to see some objective research being done on this, and I am very interested in following the results. They mention evaluating the effectiveness of giving a candidate a project to do "in their own time." I recently had a interview that included this and I can share the result: I accepted an offer from a different company that didn't require it. I doubt my life is that different than anyone else's, with a fu…

I did this once. After a take home quiz that took about an hour, I had a 6-7 hour "homework" problem. I did it, and sent it in. It took the company a month to get back to me, though I did stay in contact with the recruiter. The final answer, delivered by the recruiter, was "we've decided not to more forward at this time." No other feedback. I have no idea if anyone even looked at it - I never did speak to a dev at th…

Exact same thing here. I've made it a personal policy not to tolerate these types of take-home tests. My time is way too valuable to spend hours on a project only to have it ignored by the company.

Re: Three hundred programming interviews in thirty days

#102

Post by MadManE »

protonfish wrote: post #6

It's great to see some objective research being done on this, and I am very interested in following the results. They mention evaluating the effectiveness of giving a candidate a project to do "in their own time." I recently had a interview that included this and I can share the result: I accepted an offer from a different company that didn't require it. I doubt my life is that different than anyone else's, with a fu…

I agree. I had an interview ask this, and it was essentially solving a problem that one of their clients had presented to them. And they needed it within a week.

It felt very much like they were just exploiting applicants for crowd-sourced ideas.

Re: Three hundred programming interviews in thirty days

#103

Post by orkoden »

jordigg wrote: post #36

I really think technical, or any other kind of hiring is broken. As you showed best indicators are questions (like your quizzes) or by showing "live" you can rather than a pretty CV, certificate or a fancy university name (I'm talking about tech not medicine, construction engineering or others that really require those). I have been rejected many, many, many times because the first screening (CV check by non-technica…

For people without impressive CVs networking is key. Go to conferences, hackathons, and meetups to meet people. This will get your CV past HR almost always.

Re: Three hundred programming interviews in thirty days

#104

Post by abalone »

This is a noble project but I'm concerned that it may not be a methodologically valid blind study.

Specifically, in order to be a blind study of the relationship between the screening exam and technical interview performance, the technical interviewers should not know the results of the screening exam before they make their decision. While they do not state this clearly, it seems possible that since the same 2 people were conducting all steps themselves, that they were not properly blinded.

Thus we cannot rule out confirmation bias in the interviewers themselves, i.e. that they were impressed by good performance on the programming quiz, not that it was an independent predictor of good performance in the technical interview.

Now, maybe one person did the screening and the other did the technical interview with no information sharing in every case, but this would need to be clarified.

Re: Three hundred programming interviews in thirty days

#105

Post by kking50 »

ammon wrote: post #27
protonfish wrote: post #6

It's great to see some objective research being done on this, and I am very interested in following the results. They mention evaluating the effectiveness of giving a candidate a project to do "in their own time." I recently had a interview that included this and I can share the result: I accepted an offer from a different company that didn't require it. I doubt my life is that different than anyone else's, with a fu…

Yeah, we agree. We don't plan on asking everyone to do hours of work on their own. A lot of people don't have the time. However, we're also seeing a bunch of applicants who are good programmers, but become really stressed in interviews and do badly (they freeze). These people have trouble getting jobs. What we want to do is offer them the option of doing a larger project on their own, rather than our final interview.…

Giving an option is an awesome idea! It says a lot about the flexibility and open-mindedness of your company. Too many companies have a "take it or leave it" interview processes.

IMO it depends on the position. I did a test-project with a follow up code review for my first job and it was a fantastic. If I had not gotten the job, I still would have been happy with the experience and code to show future employers.

If you are interviewing for a more junior or senior position, many candidates are probably switching jobs and are already swamped with work. Also, they probably already have some pet projects they can share. Requiring a test project may seem amateurish.

Re: Three hundred programming interviews in thirty days

#106

Post by leeoniya »

geebee wrote: post #39
protonfish wrote: post #6

It's great to see some objective research being done on this, and I am very interested in following the results. They mention evaluating the effectiveness of giving a candidate a project to do "in their own time." I recently had a interview that included this and I can share the result: I accepted an offer from a different company that didn't require it. I doubt my life is that different than anyone else's, with a fu…

I did this once. After a take home quiz that took about an hour, I had a 6-7 hour "homework" problem. I did it, and sent it in. It took the company a month to get back to me, though I did stay in contact with the recruiter. The final answer, delivered by the recruiter, was "we've decided not to more forward at this time." No other feedback. I have no idea if anyone even looked at it - I never did speak to a dev at th…

had same experience, no useful feedback after 6 hrs of work. it had to meet the provided written spec (js/logic) and visual (css/html) requirements and had to pass an internal test suite which i was not given access to.

the response from the recruiter was just "thanks, but the dev team said 'no', that's all the info i have for you"

Re: Three hundred programming interviews in thirty days

#107

Post by rqebmm »

protonfish wrote: post #6

It's great to see some objective research being done on this, and I am very interested in following the results. They mention evaluating the effectiveness of giving a candidate a project to do "in their own time." I recently had a interview that included this and I can share the result: I accepted an offer from a different company that didn't require it. I doubt my life is that different than anyone else's, with a fu…

I often see complaints on HN about the silliness of whiteboarding in programming interviews, would you whiteboarding to a take-home assignment? Are there constraints you would prefer on one or the other? What amount of time spent qualifying for a single job is too much?

I personally pushed to make our interview process more centered around a take-home style assignment, as I feel it's a much better approximation of programming skills than an in-person, high stress whiteboarding session, or a quiz on some programming trivia. We try to keep the assignment tightly constrained ("Here's a broken app with x requirements. Fix it.") in order to keep it to a few hours max.

This I feel has been tremendously helpful for us, as I've never seen someone pass the take-home assignment and subsequently do poorly in the technical portion of our interview. Previously we had many people scrub out of our (admittedly pretty easy) technical interviews. Obviously asking for the take-home has resulted in a few false negatives, but I'd much rather an overly strong pre-interview filter to wasting hours of my entire team's time on a crappy interview.

Re: Three hundred programming interviews in thirty days

#108

Post by logfromblammo »

geebee wrote: post #39
protonfish wrote: post #6

It's great to see some objective research being done on this, and I am very interested in following the results. They mention evaluating the effectiveness of giving a candidate a project to do "in their own time." I recently had a interview that included this and I can share the result: I accepted an offer from a different company that didn't require it. I doubt my life is that different than anyone else's, with a fu…

I did this once. After a take home quiz that took about an hour, I had a 6-7 hour "homework" problem. I did it, and sent it in. It took the company a month to get back to me, though I did stay in contact with the recruiter. The final answer, delivered by the recruiter, was "we've decided not to more forward at this time." No other feedback. I have no idea if anyone even looked at it - I never did speak to a dev at th…

Proportionate buy-in to the interview process is one of my screening criteria. If the hiring company is not willing to spend a similar fraction of their own resources on the interview process as I am willing to spend on it, I am much less likely to invest anything more than a token amount of effort on them.

Any company that does not realize that your time has value before hiring you will probably continue to waste it after hiring you.

Re: Three hundred programming interviews in thirty days

#109

Post by on_and_off »

protonfish wrote: post #6

It's great to see some objective research being done on this, and I am very interested in following the results. They mention evaluating the effectiveness of giving a candidate a project to do "in their own time." I recently had a interview that included this and I can share the result: I accepted an offer from a different company that didn't require it. I doubt my life is that different than anyone else's, with a fu…

we do this at my current company. I think it is a great alternative to whiteboard tests as long as it is reasonably short. For mobile devs, we ask them to write a simple app solving a problem they should be familiar with and that we have had to deal with in the past.

Re: Three hundred programming interviews in thirty days

#110

Post by ruswick »

s0uthPaw88 wrote: post #73
protonfish wrote: post #6

It's great to see some objective research being done on this, and I am very interested in following the results. They mention evaluating the effectiveness of giving a candidate a project to do "in their own time." I recently had a interview that included this and I can share the result: I accepted an offer from a different company that didn't require it. I doubt my life is that different than anyone else's, with a fu…

I feel that if you are asking a company to invest $100k/yr on you, it is not unreasonable for them to ask for a few hours of your time.

The point is that they pay you the $100k for the time you give them as an employee. They don't pay you a cent for the interview project, so you shouldn't give them a single second in return.
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