181–190 of 1001 posts
One big issue that a take home assignment is that it removes the ability for the candidate to ask questions. Interviews are two-way streets. Nowadays, I reject more companies than I interview for based on an initial phone conversation. I have requirements in what I look for in a company and position, and some simple questions help me resolve many of the primary requirements. Given a take home exam, I will have invest…
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I might assert that what developers have is not a privilege. A privilege is something granted out of generosity or grace by another party, perhaps even undue (and hence the grace). What developers have is some "game", which makes them a "player". As soon as they lose their game, they cease to be players. Their relation to the game is exactly their value and nothing less. Tech employers are higher level players who kn…
>A privilege is something granted out of generosity or grace by another party, perhaps even undue (and hence the grace). That's quite a narrow definition. A privilege is any kind of advantage enjoyed by virtue of belonging to a group as opposed to personal merit. It's not fundamentally imoral and may well be temporary. Certainly no one has to grant someone the privilege of beauty or intelligence. In relation to other…
I saw focus on meritoriousness, undue worth, or whatever is evoked under the sense of "birthright". I'm arguing that it's gamesmanship at play, and not metaphorical birthright, and hence I speak of some of the losers of the game, as well as the higher level players who interface with the economy directly.
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Especially irritating considering I've dedicated tens of thousands of dollars and six years of my life completing a bachelor's and a master's degree in computer science where people whose entire job was to give me tests and evaluate me on them - maybe you'd like to take their word for it?
The problem is, there are people with those degrees who still can't even code fizzbuzz.
I went to a large state school for undergrad and tutored people regularly. By senior year, even the bottom performing students wouldn't have had a problem with fizzbuzz or similar screening problems. We regularly had coding problems much harder than that on tests.
Unless there were other factors involved like maybe the pressure caused by the weirdly adversarial hazing process that the tech interview has become.
I don't get it. The whole industry is complaining about not being able to hire developers, yet there seems to be some kind of competition who can come up with the most awkward hiring process. Requiring homework is a great way to deter the kind of people companies should be most interested in hiring: those who are not actively looking for a new job. I find this trend especially surprising considering that the U.S. has…
Especially irritating considering I've dedicated tens of thousands of dollars and six years of my life completing a bachelor's and a master's degree in computer science where people whose entire job was to give me tests and evaluate me on them - maybe you'd like to take their word for it?
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Exactly. Just a week or two of contract work will tell you if the candidate is a fit or not. A 30 minute phone screen will tell you if a candidate is worthy of a contract. I think companies don't do this because a. They don't want to pay and b. They don't get to gloat 'we have a super rigorous hiring process'
There is an additional difficulty in many cases: the law. Most people are not contractors with an established company/legal status as contractors, so you want to hire them. To "hire" someone formally for a week, though, entails a lot of paperwork and has, depending on the country, legal consequences (e.g. voting rights in worker councils, minimum employment durations, right to sue for wrongful termination)... The opt…
I'll take a 3-day take-home project over a whiteboard interview or live coding session any day. Working at my pace with my tools in my space? Yes please. The article makes two good points re: bias and lack of research. To the first I think it's up to us as interviewees to mention this in all of our calls. "Do you have a non-take-home option? For some groups this could be an exceptional burden." To the second there's…
> Working at my pace with my tools in my space? Yes please. I've seen varying schools of thought where a 3 day time limit implies you're expected to spend full workdays (3*8 = 24 hours) on it, which is less at your own pace. I'm still annoyed at a 2-day assignment I was given which could not be done in less than 16 man hours.
I prefer homework to timed, monitored programming sessions. But the task should never be a big task. When i interviewed for a backend development position, the task was to set up flask with two routes, connect to a dB and retrieve a couple of rows when user visited the routes. It was not hard even though I never worked with flask before, and it wasn't supposed to be hard either. It was a test if I had basic programmi…
One big issue that a take home assignment is that it removes the ability for the candidate to ask questions. Interviews are two-way streets. Nowadays, I reject more companies than I interview for based on an initial phone conversation. I have requirements in what I look for in a company and position, and some simple questions help me resolve many of the primary requirements. Given a take home exam, I will have invest…
When we gave homework, it was to a slate of junior candidates, primarily just out of college. When I did homework, I was unemployed and looking for my first job in tech.
If homework is a good idea ever, those are the circumstances. You have candidates who are hard to evaluate, will get a large benefit from a job offer, and are less likely to have severe time constraints. I wouldn't make it a requirement for all potential hires.
I've been going back and forth on how best to handle this newest trend. I don't think it's a good approach to just refuse to do them. But accepting the challenge and then not following through is even worse. So a mutual understanding of the deliverables and level of effort is required, otherwise job hunting approaches second job status.
My current stance is to first negotiate the code challenge until it's fully in your wheelhouse. If you are unable to do this, politely decline to do the code challenge, citing time constraints. One job wanted me to do a basic web app wholly in vanilla Javascript with no libraries. That's a challenge I should have just declined.
Second, refuse to accept time limitations. No company that's not paying you should be allowed to monopolize your time. One job had a hard 20 day limit and the task was both outside my wheelhouse and expected to make a measurable delta in their production application. I definitely should have declined that one.
But if a company is willing to work with you rather than subject you to an inhumanly-inflexible meat grinder, that's the one I want to work for.