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Take-home interviews

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Re: Take-home interviews

#151

Post by Bahamut »

brianwawok wrote: post #4

Seems 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…

$500 is too low - good developers will often charge $200+/hour freelancing, there is little incentive for them to deal with a take home test for that price with all of the time & stress that come with take home tests.

A choice is better than no choice though, but too many companies fumble through handling take home tests to make it worthwhile to a quality developer with any sense of value.

Re: Take-home interviews

#152

Post by snewman »

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…

Speaking as an employer: we address this by keeping our coding exercise short, and specifying a time limit. The limit ("60-90 minutes") is not rigidly enforced, but candidates know we're able to see how long they spent, and in practice almost everyone spends more than 60 and less than 90 minutes.

It's tricky. An in-person test would put the candidate in an unfamiliar environment, and makes many people nervous. A take-home test without a time limit opens itself up to the "I'd better spend lots of extra time so I can look impressive" problem. A take-home test with a hard time limit can also make people nervous. This is the best compromise we've been able to come up with (suggestions for improvement welcomed!).

As suggested on this thread, we also don't ask candidates to tackle the exercise until they've had a chance to talk to us on the phone.

Re: Take-home interviews

#153

Post by eonw »

alain94040 wrote: post #128
brianwawok wrote: post #4

Seems 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…

> 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.

this^

before i produce work for free its good to know they are actually considering me and not just throwing me work as another 'step' in their process.

Re: Take-home interviews

#154

Post by darklajid »

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…

That topic ("People do stuff at home for an interview") is a topic that comes up again and again. My last reply [1] is about a month old and feels still valid.

Don't state that 'take home tests are the worst'. That is - failing to find better words - crap. If that is the ONLY option, I understand that this might be not for you. But - that's not the case here as far as I can tell. You, as a person interested to interview, can opt in. That is awesome.

Now - you might not be the type of guy that would _want_ to opt in, but please refrain from these absolute statements. No, that's not the worst. In fact, it's probably the _best_ option for a number of people (I myself would - if I'd want to interview with this service - opt for the home project).

I fail to understand how this 'bash the home work' attitude comes up again and again. Yes, don't work for free. But if you're doing a 3h whiteboard marathon or work from your own chair? And you pick which one you prefer? I don't get the hate here..

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9770737

Re: Take-home interviews

#155

Post by rue »

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…

The value to the company is making a good hire.

Re: Take-home interviews

#156

Post by drdoom »

joslin01 wrote: post #132

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 producti…

That sucks. There was a time when being entrepreneurial was added to job descriptions as a nice to have. I went through something similar a long time ago; the reasoning was just as specious.

Good luck.

Re: Take-home interviews

#157

Post by viraptor »

Bahamut wrote: post #151
brianwawok wrote: post #4

Seems 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…

$500 is too low - good developers will often charge $200+/hour freelancing, there is little incentive for them to deal with a take home test for that price with all of the time & stress that come with take home tests. A choice is better than no choice though, but too many companies fumble through handling take home tests to make it worthwhile to a quality developer with any sense of value.

Yes, they charge $200+/h - when they actually do the work. This is my pet peeve lately when I see people throwing that number around. You're not actually working 24h. You likely don't work on the weekends. You take time to organise new work in between. Neither of the breaks are actually paid.

You get paid that much as a freelancer when you produce value for the company. So by doing an extra assignment, especially one that is a useless piece of code, no - $200/h is ridiculously high price.

Re: Take-home interviews

#158

Post by sokoloff »

bjones22 wrote: post #56
lordnacho wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You did an 8 hour test for them at full concentration, and they didn't even get back to you? Please name these idiots.

Not OP, but as someone who took a 6 hour test at full concentration, with no feedback other then a polite 'no', there are a few reasons I don't out them. 1) I didn't score well on the test. It's within reason they read this post and release my scores with a 'it was because he scored low'. Future employers then come across my scores and deny me. 2) Don't bite the hand that's like the hand that MIGHT feed you. You don'…

Getting back to you with a no (and nothing else) is quite a stretch from literally nothing as OP.

I think you're playing the game of life with your scared setting turned up too high. You might get better results to turn the bold up a bit over time as you gain confidence.

Re: Take-home interviews

#159

Post by jays »

My personal favorite method is similar to this and we use it at my current company.

The big difference of course is that we pay for the candidates time. Not everyone has 5-20 hours to burn on a project in terms of free time. It's a big commitment, especially for the folks with families.

Some key benefits of a project for our interview process:

* We get to see a candidates programming skills with a greenfield project. This gives us a chance to analyze all aspects of development (organizing code, creating tests, using best practices, ect.).

* Candidates get to act as if they are on the team, so they are encouraged to ask questions, get feedback, ect. throughout the project. This gives us a chance to see how well they communicate in addition to their programming skills, which is REALLY important to us, since we're an entirely distributed team.

* The project is not throwaway for the candidate nor us. We usually have an ongoing list of libraries and tools that we need internally for our projects, so the candidate is actually contributing to our mission. This also justifies paying a candidate for their time

Re: Take-home interviews

#160

Post by sokoloff »

brianwawok wrote: post #4

Seems 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…

> But then other people say "Why should I program for free at home, my resume clearly shows I am already a skilled programmer.

Yes, and if I copy that resume and put my 6 year old's name on it, then her resume clearly shows she is a skilled programmer.

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