Take-home interviews

I considered a job out in SF working for a decently well-known guy, Andrew Chen. I had gone through 4 coding interviews progressively working my way up their ladder to their CTO. Now, each of these I did well on but they didn't like how fast I went. Despite them saying "Our fastest done was 1hr!", they didn't seem to appreciate me going fast and came to the conclusion that I probably didn't know how to write production code -- just a quick hacker. Actually, it was rather annoying because their "top" iOS dev didn't even understand basic shit I was doing. He'd have to keep stopping me and being like wait -- why'd you do that? Yet as I worked my way up, I really enjoyed a couple of their engineers and CTO. I didn't have to hold THEIR hand during a code interview.

So I was an iOS developer getting considered for Android position, and they said "hey it's great you can code fast & all, but can you learn fast?" and told me to create an Android app that searched images on Google. I sighed because I had already been through 4 coding interviews, but oh well, this will be it I thought. Since I wanted to do a good job, I spent two hard days working on it basically all day every day. Since I was new to Android world, I had to learn that while being productive. You can see the result of my efforts here: https://github.com/joslinm/android-image-search-example. I thought I did a nice job because rather than using a HTTP library, I read the streams myself to give nice progress indicators for each image (which persisted even thru phone rotates).

I give it to them and they say, "ok seems to be working." After that, I was invited to SF to interview with them in person -- actually, interview is the wrong word, I would be working with them for 2 full days. So we did that. When I wasn't coding, I was being grilled about my work history (perfectly acceptable, but why didn't we do this earlier?). Finally, after that, I was told they had come to their decision. Thinking I was a shoe-in, I went to go meet with Andrew. Andrew's decision: "You're too entrepreneurial."

Now let's examine this for a quick second. They had come to a pretty fair conclusion that I was too entrepreneurial after talking to me. They realized, hey this kid is a go-getter and probably isn't the greatest fit for our #7. Yet this was AFTER copious amounts of coding and wasting my time doing all these code interviews and even joining them to code in-house. If they had just went about a pretty normal interview, they would have discovered this fact way earlier and not wasted either of our time. So why waste my time forcing me to code before they do their diligence? Because he's Andrew Chen; you can google his name and discover who he is. It would be a "honor" to work for such a prestigious start-up pundit. In other words, he can get away with it.

For those of you considering a start-up and actually have skill.. don't get taken advantage of by these bogus work projects. The employer wins because he's not paying you and gets a lot of evaluation for free. And if they do insist on you working with them for a couple days, you insist on getting paid for those couple days.

Or, if they don't actually expect you to spend more than 3 hours on the task, they will compare you to people who have spent 9 hours on it.

Had that recently: they said "spend no more than two hours on it" so I finished in about an hour and 45 that evening and flipped it over.

Then they started asking why my 20 or so unit tests only covered the basics when other candidates had full unit tests in the two hour time frame. I told them the other candidates were simply lying :-)

This. Happened with my most recent round of interviews. I took an initial stab at one assignment, moved onto other opportunities, and landed an offer before getting back to the project work.

At least the take-home work I did perform in my second-to-last job search provided good, compact example code for my last search.

Yes, but that switches the cost back onto the company instead of the employee.

I've done quite a few "at home" programming challenges [1][2][3] as well as hacking challenges and most of my experiences have been overwhelmingly negative. The challenge is that "programming" is about 20% writing code and 80% other stuff (requirements, design, testing, security, documentation, meetings, beer, etc...). It seems like the proposed solution is not addressing the problem: Explaining how to solve a programming challenges you may have never heard of on the spot.

I do agree that interviews add a level of pressure, but what you're trying to gauge thought process. How does the candidate think about solving the problem; Can they iterate; Can we lower the space and/or time complexity; Can this be solved recursively, Are they receptive to input? A take home assignment does't help you figure any of that out. Usually, the team who is interviewing already knows the answer to the specific problem and all of the intricacies (based on having to solve it on an internal project or just because it's a question they've asked before), but the goal is to see someone thinking in real-time.

In my career, I've never had a time where I go off on my own, work on something and come back to the team with a solution. Even when I was writing TI-83 programs in High School to solve all of my science homework and finish 50 minute tests in 10 minutes; I still had classmates asking me about what I was doing along the way. There is always discussion and I feel like by sending me off on my own, all of that goes out of the window. You can't verify if I copied the code from anywhere else, you don't know if I had my buddy who is an engineer at another company break down the answer for me to spit it back to you, and you don't know if I paired with someone else to get the assignment complete. I'm obviously biased based on my experiences doing over 40 interviews in Silicon Valley/SF. My goal for this type of interview question would be to understand how the candidate thinks; I don't care if you write your answer in Brainfk[4].

[1] - https://github.com/joeblau/sample-elevator-control-system

[2] - https://github.com/joeblau/sample-top-ten-tweets

[3] - https://github.com/joeblau/sample-url-shortner

[4] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck