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Take-home interviews

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Re: Take-home interviews

#141

Post by chc »

bbcbasic wrote: post #102
chc wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many other fields require competency tests. What other field requires you to do a potentially unbounded amount of free work in the open and give it away to everybody? Not everybody has any major projects on Github. The lack thereof does not signal lack of programming aptitude. If somebody has done a lot of great work, but it was all for employers and clients, that doesn't mean they would do poor work for you if you w…

Licensing should be up to the candidate, and it could be commercially licensed and not available to everybody. You shouldn't have to write a OS Kernel or a modern browser in your spare time either. I'd say it would be about 4-8 hours work that shows off your skills. But if you prefer to spend that same time on some inane made-up problem for one employer and code something that you will wont enjoy writing and never us…

> Licensing should be up to the candidate, and it could be commercially licensed and not available to everybody.

> You shouldn't have to write a OS Kernel or a modern browser in your spare time either. I'd say it would be about 4-8 hours work that shows off your skills.

Well, this is a different suggestion. Now we're only talking about a few hours of work rather than a pet project. I don't think the licensing makes much of a difference since I probably couldn't monetize four hours of randomly dorking around. I'm still not a huge fan of the idea, though, because it sounds hard to me to show off (adequately) skills I've spent decades acquiring with less than a day's worth of aimless work. I don't feel like it would be very impressive.

> Is there a field that requires 4-8hr competency tests where each test is wildly different from the previous, with completely opaque criteria.

Nobody is advocating for eight-hour tests. The OP said they expected their test to take less than half that. And most fields that require competency tests (e.g. cooking, acting, music) will expect you to do it live, on the spot. Take-home tests are being suggested in the case of programming specifically because programmers hate being expected to perform on the spot.

> At least with the provide your own project idea, if the employer has fucked up criteria the candidate has only wasted a few seconds of their time in sending the zip file.

Not all criteria that someone might test for are "fucked up." If I'm looking for, say, somebody to do a math-heavy machine learning job, and your pet open-source project is a jQuery plugin that makes web page backgrounds sparkly, the mismatch between those two is not the fault of my criteria.

Re: Take-home interviews

#143

Post by drdoom »

bjones22 wrote: post #29
TranquilMarmot wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently graduated from college and started looking for my first programming jobs. I ran into a ton of these "take home" interviews and they were some of the most stressful things I've ever done. The first one, they asked me to solve an incredibly complex math problem that I had no idea about so I struggled with it for 5 or so hours before giving up. Probably good that they didn't give me the job; if they were expe…

Just want to say, in conjecture to my sibling post on this thread, I had a identical experience. In fact, if you're in the Bay Area we likely applied to the same companies. My take-homes made me fundamentally question my ability as a programmer. And I'm a damn good programmer. That is wrong on so many levels. I can only pledge that if I'm ever in a position to hire developers (at any level) that I'll never force that…

Sorry to hear that. Do you remember what question or problem they asked you?

Re: Take-home interviews

#144

Post by odonnellryan »

robspychala wrote: post #106

From the employees' perspective: Take home tests are the worst. Company says take home test will take 3 hours to complete. They never do. Schedule 2x or 3x the estimate. Especially if you want to impress the reviewer. You send it over, then the company says no or yes, only to move to new stage. In the worst case you ruined your weekend and received a no. But the company just took 10 minutes to arbitrarily reject your…

I've gotten some pretty wacky projects. Basically, implement a fairly-complex web app. Something that I'd assume (even after doing similar tasks) would probably take me up to 40 hours of work, just because the scope is so crazy. They want user login, multiple features, etc... basically an MVP for a small product.

It's hard. If you submit part of the project, which you usually have to do unless you're unemployed, they never go for it. If you call out of work a day or two to do the project... and you don't get the job anyway...

Re: Take-home interviews

#145

Post by odonnellryan »

brianwawok wrote: post #9
hanlec wrote: post #7

As 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…

I was asked recently by a big company to code some classes in Python, on paper. They then questioned my indentation, syntax, and case-sensitivity multiple times!

A valid question, but paper-code?

Re: Take-home interviews

#146

Post by mellery451 »

This sounds like a brilliant idea. I hope that you are also including homework assignments that cover (1) communication skills (especially WRITTEN communication) and (2) personality. In my experience, those two areas are far more critical to success than raw coding skills. Also, everyone should pass the "no assholes" test, if there is such a thing.

I hope that you expect the same amount of prerequisite work for all of your candidates (marketing, finance, sales).

Re: Take-home interviews

#147

Post by odonnellryan »

shockzzz wrote: post #120

"Hey! Stop measuring me and give me job! I'm smart you asshole." ~ every software engineer in the world Anyone else realize we're the only ones who complain about this shit?

The interview process if kind-of crazy. I've been looking for a job for the last few weeks and been on a few dozen interviews. 90% of my experience is this:

1) They have a very-long interview process. Start to end is months, with weeks between communications. 2) Each phase, when there are often from 6-10, can take anytime from 2-8 hours. 3) Projects are always either right off the bat, and lengthy, or a surprise at the end of the interview.

Re: Take-home interviews

#148

Post by sheepmullet »

dmitrygr wrote: post #38

Gauging ability to operate under pressure is valuable too...ever tried to fix a bug on a device that was supposed to ship yesterday, under the pressure of the entirety of the hierarchy above you all the way up to the CxO? It helps to know if the candidate you hire will handle that, or fall apart just when you need him/her to do the job he/she is paid for.

As an organisation you have to decide on what you want. The developers who can handle high stress situations are rarely the most skilled developers.

If you are hiring for a high stress environment then you need to focus upon candidates who can handle stressful environments over candidates who write really good software.

On the other hand most environments are not high stress.

Re: Take-home interviews

#149

Post by sokoloff »

SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #133
alain94040 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Offer $500 as a 1099 contractor to complete the assignment within the next 2 weeks or so. I like this, not for the money, but because it guarantees that the company is not giving this assignment to 100 different candidates ($500 x 100 is getting prohibitive for a hiring budget). I'm more willing to put the effort if I know I'm one of the "finalists" for the position.

Agreed that it's a positive thing to actually pay people for nontrivial amounts of work. Downside is that, as a company paying someone to accomplish a task, I'd want to give a different task to each applicant, so that if they do a good job, it provides value to the company. And this is a problem because rarely are two programming problems exactly as difficult as each other, so the test isn't normalized. Interviewing…

Make the number $250 and give everyone the same problem (which you have to change every so often because of glassdoor and the like).

That's less than you're already spending on salary for the interview slate, so you're at most doubling your already small costs for a critically important function for your company.

Re: Take-home interviews

#150

Post by pixeloution »

bjones22 wrote: post #29
TranquilMarmot wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently graduated from college and started looking for my first programming jobs. I ran into a ton of these "take home" interviews and they were some of the most stressful things I've ever done. The first one, they asked me to solve an incredibly complex math problem that I had no idea about so I struggled with it for 5 or so hours before giving up. Probably good that they didn't give me the job; if they were expe…

Just want to say, in conjecture to my sibling post on this thread, I had a identical experience. In fact, if you're in the Bay Area we likely applied to the same companies. My take-homes made me fundamentally question my ability as a programmer. And I'm a damn good programmer. That is wrong on so many levels. I can only pledge that if I'm ever in a position to hire developers (at any level) that I'll never force that…

I can only say that if you're ever hiring, you probably will ask people to code for you. You won't at first, but after you've hired a few who could "talk the talk" but then can't actually write readable, maintainable, and in some cases working code, you'll reevaluate.

There's a gap between knowing concepts and knowing how to apply those concepts. There's actually a certain (limited) amount of artistry to writing code. Hiring a programmer without seeing code is like hiring an Architect without ever having seen a house he's designed.

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