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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Now imagine you are a candidate interviewing with 3 companies and they all give you a take-home assignment and each one takes a weekend to complete.
and this is a problem why exactly? if you have three interviews on the same friday you may want to space that out :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ideally it shouldn't take more than 4 hours, but even then is it that different than traveling to a different city for an onsite day of whiteboard interviews?
Ideally yeah but does it ever take "only" 4 hours? Usually take-homes are pretty unguided and leave room for personalization, plus there's an element of pressure to them to make it "awesome," do all of the best practices, etc. At least with a pair coding session there's someone there setting the guard rails to keep you within 1h.
And then you're still nervous and have to explain your thought process around everything you're doing as you're coding.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Now imagine you are a candidate interviewing with 3 companies and they all give you a take-home assignment and each one takes a weekend to complete.
Ideally it shouldn't take more than 4 hours, but even then is it that different than traveling to a different city for an onsite day of whiteboard interviews?
It is different than traveling to a different city for an onsite because you're not wasting your teams time on a candidate unless you think they have a good chance of getting to the end. You have "skin in the game" as they say.
If hiring managers were only issuing homework to candidates already scheduled for a full round of interviews, so interviewers have standardized material to talk about and as a substitute for whiteboarding, it wouldn't be so bad. Instead you mostly get nothing to show for your time and when you do get a round of interviews nobody looks at what you did and wants you to do medium+hard leetcode on the shared screen.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
and this is a problem why exactly? if you have three interviews on the same friday you may want to space that out :)
It's an employer's market. Why would an employer want to wait 3-4 weeks for someone to interview elsewhere when there's a dozen other candidates in the pipeline?
on a side note - if employer does not want to wait and wants to rush the hire chances are you don’t want to work there anyways…
I know some people hate take-home assessments, but for me it's a total life saver in interviews. I don't "think" out loud while I'm working, and there's no way in hell I'm doing it nervous while someone is looking over my shoulder. Using Leetcode as a filter is great if you're looking for someone who interviews often, but in my experience it's not a great gauge if someone is a good engineer or not. As a hiring manage…
I'm a staff engineer with ADHD and extreme test anxiety. When looking for another job during COVID I was rejected by every company at the screening stage I spoke to. The only offer I got was for Netflix which gave me a take-home assignment. It was wonderful because I had confidence in my code when I brought it back to the interviewers and could explain very clearly what was going on. I ended up not taking the job due…
But most people don’t understand why I do the thing I do and start saying no and that’s not supposed to go there and why aren’t you writing a test first? Because I don’t want to. I will arrive at your conclusion don’t worry just please give me time. I will move this code around don’t worry about it. There you see now it’s all fine. But they don’t understand that I just want something to work fast and then I’ll refactor and make it nice.
And then they start demanding and that’s when my flow breaks and then I do shit work because they force me to accept their views.
Ofc granted those are shitty workplaces but chances are I’m not gonna work with the person interviewing me and also when you are looking for a job without a job then you kinda don’t care and want it make it work somehow.
Bah.
> I had no job, I ran on my savings, and the workplace I was interviewing for looked nice. OF COURSE I WAS NERVOUS. 100% this. I've never been nervous on the job , even during a work crisis. But I'm not a stage performer, and I'm super nervous during an audition, where strangers are standing over you, judging you, and you can lose the job if you do any little thing wrong, or even if you don't do anything wrong. That'…
I'll be branching off towards a different career path because of this. Tying your employability to passing these tests rather than your accomplishments as a professional is a sucker's game long term.
Good luck!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you’re getting quality hires with take homes, doesn’t that mean that even if theres filtering going on, its still effective to a degree as opposed to being totally arbitrary?
I would think so, but we'll have 100 people come in and talk about the quality hires they get from LeetCode interviews.
"Our interview process is perfect! We've never had a bad hire."
"What about that guy we hired to rewrite our engine? The ex-googler? We had to fire him after a month."
"Oh, yeah. I forgot about him."
Leetcode is slavery for developers. Shun any company that uses that for interviews because they are cargo culting idiots.