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We compiled a library of realistic engineering take-home tests and ranked them

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Re: We compiled a library of realistic engineering take-home tests and ranked them

#101

Post by stephenhogsten »

chrisweekly wrote: post #77
andreyk wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

"can't Google for solutions"? 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 fundament…

I don't want to speak for the last commenter, but I think they meant google for literal solutions to this take-home (i.e. cheating to beat the timer).

I do strongly agree that people should be able to use whatever resources they normally have (google, mdn, autocompleting editor, etc.). This is how they would work on the job. Getting quizzed on easily referenced random trivia about language features is so dumb.

Re: We compiled a library of realistic engineering take-home tests and ranked them

#102

Post by _odey »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #91
_odey wrote: post #15

Now take that list, throw it in the rubbish bin and wash your hands thoroughly. Take home challenges are simply an absurd waste of time and a huge disrespect towards your candidates personal time. You ask them to spend 4 or more hour of their free time on a useless, throwaway excersise that you "review" in 5 minutes and you conclude they're good enough because they laid out code the way you like it... You never see t…

Your process seems equally flawed. Many excellent candidates have no open-source code, and if they show you any closed-source code that's an immediate signal against hiring them. So now you've put candidates through a silly "live coding challenge" – offering an advantage to the sort of person who is chatty and communicative with strangers in a stressful environment and the expense of people who may be better engineer…

It might be flawed in terms of filtering out the type of person that does not do well in live pairing scenarios.

But I disagree it's _equally_ flawed. The time investment from a candidate is significantly smaller at the cost of more time investment from the employer's side (aka my side). Personally I consider this a reasonable trade-off.

Re: We compiled a library of realistic engineering take-home tests and ranked them

#103

Post by Ancient »

anchochilis wrote: post #76
twawaaay wrote: post #5

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…

As a candidate, I vastly prefer a take-home to live whiteboarding or pairing. That background sensation of being observed and evaluated greatly interferes with my ability to concentrate and perform at my best. (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)

Perfectly articulated. Thank you!

+1 Vote

Re: We compiled a library of realistic engineering take-home tests and ranked them

#104

Post by stephenhogsten »

ysavir wrote: post #54
andreyk wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

What if I have a lot going on and need to divide my time? I understand why you're choosing to do this, but ultimately it's assuming a lot on part of the interviewee, and doesn't offer any flexibility. If you gave me such a code challenge, I'd probably take it as a sign that company culture is to put employees under pressure and I would immediately decline.

Compared to committing to a specific hour block of time for a normal interview, isn't it more flexible?

I guess it depends on how the company uses it - if they just stick the take-home in as an extra filter vs trying to replace live interview time

Re: We compiled a library of realistic engineering take-home tests and ranked them

#105

Post by bogomipz »

Jensson wrote: post #84
bogomipz wrote: post #32

The entry for this company Haraj states: >"Just fyi, this submission make up to 50% from your overall hiring score. While your CV only make up to 5%. So do your best to create great submission!" >"UPDATE (2022-02-05): Due to many great candidates have applied to this vacancy, we decided to close this challenge on Friday (2022-02-11). So we will wait for the last submission until Thursday (2022-02-10) at 23:59 WIB." […

People with a bad CV but good skills would do it. There are a lot of those people entering the market every year so it makes sense for some companies to look for gems among the people other companies considers unhireable.

That doesn't seem to make sense. If someone had good skills why wouldn't they just embellish their resume a bit? Also there's still a preliminary phone screen interview before even asking a candidate to complete this.

Re: We compiled a library of realistic engineering take-home tests and ranked them

#106

Post by stephenhogsten »

ghaff wrote: post #56
NeverFade wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know they clearly took over two hours? We love talking about productivity here. You're telling me employers will systematically fail the candidates who performed most productively in their process, because of a speculation they took too much time?

And a reasonable response in any case is "Yah, I know you said that but I don't like to do sloppy work and there were clearly a number of different edge cases that needed to be handled for this to work reliably."

I've seen a middle ground where a timebox is enforced, but there's a discussion question for what next steps would be

Re: We compiled a library of realistic engineering take-home tests and ranked them

#107

Post by irf1 »

morelisp wrote: post #78
irf1 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You awarded 5 of them, or 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!

Received 5 PRs, awarded the top 3. You can actually see them https://app.algora.io/algora/challenge/pulls/5

We clarified it in our bounty issue that only the best-winning submissions would get the bounty. Other folks have chosen to award all PR submissions regardless of hiring outcome. The format is up to the company hiring.

You're making a great point! It's exactly about what we ask from people who don't get hired.

I think real-world coding, getting reviewed by the CTO / hiring manager and getting compensated beats standardized coding tests & imaginary take-home assignments any time of the day.

Re: We compiled a library of realistic engineering take-home tests and ranked them

#108

Post by tharkun__ »

magicloop wrote: post #100

My attitude is that take-home tests should be given to candidates if they cannot share work they've already done. This creates a win-win incentive because it would become standard in our industry to have a portfolio of GitHub contributions, a stack overflow profile, etc. At least those artefacts are helpful to a wider community as well as showing your abilities. Couple this with an open ended technical conversation w…

I have never in my life done something you can find on Github and I doubt I ever will. I have worked on plenty of stuff that I can share generic 'war stories' on, stuff you might even have 'used' without knowing but that isn't actually anything I could really "show" to you. Other than said war stories, like 'did you ever ride a train and it was late? Yeah I worked on xyz backend thing which ultimately is involved in getting that info to that info screen at the train station'.

And no I don't think you can put any incentives anywhere to get that code onto a Github repo, nevermind a public one.

Re: We compiled a library of realistic engineering take-home tests and ranked them

#109

Post by [deleted] »

fernandotakai wrote: post #71
not_the_fda wrote: post #26

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.

i honestly prefer a take-home exercise to live-coding. 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.

[deleted]

Re: We compiled a library of realistic engineering take-home tests and ranked them

#110

Post by d23 »

These are great in theory. In practice, I've regretted the handful of times I've done them. It seems like some companies use this as a way to "waste" less of their interviewers' time. One particular dysfunctional company that everyone here would recognized gave me the feedback: you're one of the candidates out of nearly 200 that did this [7-10 hour take home test] and passed! Then they ghosted me for a month before asking me to come on for a full day onsite.
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