Take-home interviews
blog.triplebyte.com
Take-home interviews
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Re: Take-home interviews
#2This is great. I especially love that candidates are given a choice, so if they prefer the traditional technical interview they can choose that.
Normalizing performance between the two interview types will be challenging, but I think the benefits to be reaped far outweigh the difficulty of the challenges.
Re: Take-home interviews
#3That looks great. Are there enough problem seeds to help combat sharing of answers?
Now we just need you at non-YC startups, too.
Re: Take-home interviews
#4Seems good, I like the choice.
In discussions on this topic I see a lot of: "Programming on the spot is hard, let people program at home"! But then other people say "Why should I program for free at home, my resume clearly shows I am already a skilled programmer. All this will do is cater to young people without families, or those fresh out of school".
I am not looking to hire devs right now, but I am thinking about the same idea with a tiny tweak when we move to that stage. If the verbal interview goes well, offer 2 choices. Make it clear neither choice is seen as the better choice, and both will be judged equally.
* Sit on a computer with me for an hour, and show me how to code a fairly simple program.
or
* Get a small actual work assignment to take home and code. Would expect it to take maybe 5 hours to code. Offer $500 as a 1099 contractor to complete the assignment within the next 2 weeks or so.
This gives both groups a chance. The too busy to do a big programming assignments can code in front of me for an hour. I should be able to judge their chops pretty fast. For the people more nervous to code in front of me, they can get paid a nominal fee to code some small piece of code.
The only group I exclude is the group that doesn't feel the need to show code to land a job, but not too interested in that group. I have seen too many good talkers and bad coders to want to risk this group.
Re: Take-home interviews
#5That looks great. Are there enough problem seeds to help combat sharing of answers? Now we just need you at non-YC startups, too.
Triplebyte founder here. I can't be entirely sure until we give this a try, but the hope is we'll be able to tell if the candidate wrote the code by talking to them for 45-minutes about what they've done.
Re: Take-home interviews
#6This sounds like a great alternative and certainly would work well for me. What I'm afraid of though, is that I'd pass your interview and the aforementioned YCombinator companies would again want to put me through the on-site, high-pressure whiteboard technical interview.
Re: Take-home interviews
#7As many other parts of an interview, I've always found the blackboard coding session extremely strange. When was the last time you coded in TextEdit with no docs around, no time to think, standing up, and being watched over the shoulder?
Re: Take-home interviews
#8This sounds like a great alternative and certainly would work well for me. What I'm afraid of though, is that I'd pass your interview and the aforementioned YCombinator companies would again want to put me through the on-site, high-pressure whiteboard technical interview.
That's definitely something we've started addressing as we optimize the process of matching programmers with the right startups. We're starting to gather data on how the YC companies run their hiring processes (seeing the degree of variance has been fascinating) and we can use that to avoid exactly this happening.
Re: Take-home interviews
#9As many other parts of an interview, I've always found the blackboard coding session extremely strange. When was the last time you coded in TextEdit with no docs around, no time to think, standing up, and being watched over the shoulder?
I have pseudo-coded on blackboards many times, which is really what a blackboard coding interview should be. If you get a ding for writing .foreach instead of .forEach, that seems a bit picky ;)
However I realize I may have a bias as I do ok on most blackboard coding interviews I have done.. maybe been stumped 1 time out of 15 or so in my life? Some of it is a skill, that the more you do the better you get at it, but being good at it does not make you good at actual coding.
Re: Take-home interviews
#10As many other parts of an interview, I've always found the blackboard coding session extremely strange. When was the last time you coded in TextEdit with no docs around, no time to think, standing up, and being watched over the shoulder?
Approximately weekly, when explaining something to another engineer.