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Take-home interviews

blog.triplebyte.com

161–170 of 295 posts

Re: Take-home interviews

#161

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 would rather spend 8 hours at home giving the interviewer a realistic impression of my abilities than 1 hour mumbling over a whiteboard and getting trashcanned because the interviewer mistakenly thinks that whiteboard skills prove anything at all.

As for receiving outside help, if you're judging applicants solely on their homework results, you are Doing It Wrong. The best interview I've ever had gave me a take-home programming assignment by email, then when I came in the lead programmer asked me to explain the program line-by-line and justify various decisions I made. I got the job.

Re: Take-home interviews

#162

This seems like a wonderful idea. I hate coding interviews, because I freeze up and I look like a total idiot and cannot do even the simplest things. Same thing at exams in school or university - my mind just went blank and into a noisy self-rumination loop. I guess it's called anxiety. I interviewed with Google last week and bombed it, even though the problem was quite simple and I would have solved it wonderfully w…

As others have mentioned, the trade-offs can be pretty complicated. Perhaps the take-home is always better for you, I won't try to argue against your personal preferences, I'm simply going to list a few reasons why it turns out worse for a lot of people.

For one thing, as expected, the take-home questions are typically far larger than in-person interview questions. When you go into the office you're generally asked, in my experience, much simpler questions; you might get a simple FizzBuzz-like starter, and a few slightly more difficult ones. All in, it takes a few hours (Google and the like can be an exception to that, but I'll get to that after - I'm comparing smaller companies right now).

The take-home work I've seen has generally been suggested by the company to take 8 hours, but typically been a bit more; they've been along the lines of build a fairly simple crud (I've had one that was a calendar, another that's a stream, etc.) with a bootstrap-or-similar UI, back-end validations, and unit tests for the initial commit, implement these 3-5 features on top of it in separate commits (tested, also standard bootstrap-or-similar UI, proper validation, etc.) And then, simply provide access to the repo.

At first, this didn't seem wrong, in fact I figured "well, I guess it's a good way for them to see that you understand everything". But it came with several annoyances. For one thing, since each feature is a commit, unless you specifically try to prevent it they can see things like how long each part took; even if not consciously, this makes people try to get the work done quickly, without taking many breaks. It sort of reintroduces the "hard to 'refactor' your ideas during a 45m coding interview" problem. Another annoyance is that sometimes (and judging by other comments here, even often) they don't respond at all. The silence is unpleasant, to say the least. In-person, you can at least try to read tone and facial expressions.

The other problem is one company I applied with threw a 10+ hour take-home without any warning before the interview. So a bit over an hour in their office, and another 10+ later. This is difficult if you're working another job. It's very difficult if you have a couple such take-homes at the same time, and a full-time, in office job. Scheduling a few interviews around work, and other commitments, is pretty feasible, but throwing in dozens of hours of additional coding is more difficult.

With companies like Google, you know ahead of time approximately how long it will take. You can take time off accordingly. The process is known going in, and that's great.

Basically, I think that for many people, myself included, white-board interviews are very stressful and frightening, but not quite as much so as: scheduling lots of extra time around your life, budgeting X extra hours because they take longer than suggested, building out the (much larger) projects, still having the time-constraint/expectancy issues, and after all of that not always even getting a message/comment afterward.

Both interview processes suck.

Re: Take-home interviews

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Problem the 1st: how do you verify the example project is actually the candidate's own work?" Have them discuss the code in depth. Architectural and design decisions, coding conventions, alternate approaches they rejected, etc. Pretty hard to fake this if they didn't write the code. "Problem the 3rd: evaluating a large, unfamiliar codebase is actually really hard." Good chance to assess the candidate's ability to do…

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

No it reduces the cost to the employee, with no additional cost to the company. At least in $ or time terms. Sure ... a senior developer interviewer may need to fire up a few extra neurons.

Re: Take-home interviews

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$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…

But when comparing the difference, and considering a code project for an interview has a tendency to be even more stressful, which would a person rather spend their time on? It certainly is not the code project - I have heard & experienced too many stories where companies vastly underallocate time, or not respect that job seekers have other things that keep them busy typically, including less bureaucracy/time wasting (especially if a candidate has significant open source contributions), or not looking at the project, or even rejecting candidates for non-code related reasons (happened to someone I know today).

I'd much rather freelance for that type of stress & when having to compare the economics time-wise, which a take home test simply does not match - that is the whole point.

If a company does not want to pay that much, maybe they should respect the prospective employee's time, especially since it is a job seeker's market.

Re: Take-home interviews

#165

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 had a few take home projects that weren't so bad.

But the last one I did...

A junior just basically shat all over the project and claimed a lot of things.

[The submission was to write a few sample sort functions for a library... the recruiter asked for an app, the paper asked for a library.. I did both... what did I get shat upon for? The user interface/cli that wasn't required.. another thing.. Why did I have 66 commits?]

Re: Take-home interviews

#166
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait - where does it say this is an option? It isn't as far as I can tell - it is how they do it. You either invest 3-9 hours on a "project" before the interview or you don't get the interview. This isn't "an alternative testing process" as such.

I logged into my TripleByte account and selected it as an option. The UI is still broken, but yes: it's an option. It's a separate track you can choose to be on.

If its an option and they don't exhibit any bias towards candidates that prefer a traditional interview then thats fine, but they should make it clear in the article.

Re: Take-home interviews

#167
post #165

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 had a few take home projects that weren't so bad. But the last one I did... A junior just basically shat all over the project and claimed a lot of things. [The submission was to write a few sample sort functions for a library... the recruiter asked for an app, the paper asked for a library.. I did both... what did I get shat upon for? The user interface/cli that wasn't required.. another thing.. Why did I have 6…

yuck! why did you have 66 commits?

Re: Take-home interviews

#168
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

> 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

So you would be against a developer test too then?

> (e.g. cooking, acting, music) will expect you to do it live, on the spot.

Fair enough. So the developer equivalent should be a 1 hour technical interview, with perhaps a coding exercise on a computer within that hour. I am happy with those. To reduce the pressure the interviewer could leave the room for 10 mins while you code something. It is the do 4 hours work in your own time for a chance to get an interview or get to the next round that bugs me. And in reality I'd spend 8 just to maximize the chance of getting the job.

> your pet open-source project is a jQuery plugin that makes web page backgrounds sparkly

Yes there are sub divisions in the 'software developer' category. If you want a machine learning job you kind of have to demonstrate it one way or another. I argue that the option to show your existing code rather than do additional work on a made up problem is valuable.

Re: Take-home interviews

#169
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem with them is fundamental: "You will only get someone desperate enough to take your exam." Lots of people do poorly in whiteboard situations. As an employer, you may assert that you don't want any of them, fine. But I don't see the problem in giving people the option of using an alternative testing process.

Wait - where does it say this is an option? It isn't as far as I can tell - it is how they do it. You either invest 3-9 hours on a "project" before the interview or you don't get the interview. This isn't "an alternative testing process" as such.

The post pretty clearly says:

> To solve the problem of interview anxiety, we're adding a second track to our interview process at Triplebyte. Applicants, if they choose, will be able go through our process by completing programming projects on their own time.

> The project-based track will require a larger time commitment (and we expect lots of people to stick with the standard track for this reason).

Re: Take-home interviews

#170

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 interv…

Oh as a number of people have indicated

its bad for the company because the candidate can work with someone else and produce a glowing submission. I have helped a number of people do these some that have gotten the job.

its bad for the interviewee. They may spend 10-15 hours on this and get rejected for no reason at all. Do you think the person reviewing the submission is putting multiple hours into it. Doubtful.

If the intent is truly(and I mean truly) help individuals that struggle with traditional interviewing techniques then kudos. Demonstrate this by allowing candidates to interview in a way that is comfortable for them(including not taking your take home test) If its the company saying "my time is more valuable than yours. Do this assignment then we'll talk" then no thanks.

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