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Take-home interviews

blog.triplebyte.com

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Re: Take-home interviews

#21

Post by physcab »

I like this idea. I took the Triplebyte quiz mostly out of curiosity and then decided to stop when I was prompted for a phone interview. I like the idea of "pre-qualifying" myself for a job even before I'm ready, so that when the time is right, I can pull the trigger and switch easily.

With a phone interview you have to commit, which is no problem if you're in the market. But if you're not in the market and you still want your options to be open, interviewing on your own time makes a lot of sense and reduces the mental burden and stress of switching.

Re: Take-home interviews

#22

Post by TranquilMarmot »

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…

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 expecting me to know the level of math they were requesting then I would have had a pretty bad time. So I guess the test worked in that regard.

The second one interview at a different company, they gave me more moderate questions after a phone interview- mostly questions testing knowledge of a specific language. When I asked how long it would take, I was told "you have a deadline of 8 hours from when you download the zip file to when you turn in your code, expect it to take the entire 8 hours". That was probably the most stressful 8 hours of my life, way worse than any whtieboard interview would have been. I didn't look away from my computer once the whole time, did not let myself get up to eat, go to the bathroom, or anything. My girlfriend was in the room and tried to console me while I was doing it and stressing out and I ended up yelling at her to be quiet because I was trying to hard to concentrate. I finished the last problem about 10 minutes before the deadline, zipped the files up, and sent it to them. I never heard back.

Favorite interview I've ever had was a combo of a live coding session and a phone interview. They used an online tool that they gave me a link to that had syntax highlighting. The interviewer on the phone could see where I was typing and could highlight stuff etc. Think google docs, but for coding. They asked me to write some algorithms, then asked me to re-write them recursively, then asked a bunch of questions about the limitations of the algorithm, cases when it would be used, etc. It was fun, not stressful in any way, and the interviewer even taught me some things along the way! I feel like they got a really good picture of my thought processes and my personality so they could accurately judge if I would be a good fit on the team.

Paying somebody to do the take-home coding assignment and paying them would definitely help alleviate some of the stress, but I'm still not a fan of the format. You don't know how long it took the person to make their solutions, and you don't get a good idea for how they work, only what they can do (both are equally important, in my opinion).

Re: Take-home interviews

#23

Post by ammon »

mathattack wrote: post #16

I like these great in concept. When I've been between jobs, I've been very happy to participate in them. A couple open questions: 1 - Is it reasonable to expect a 10x programmer whom your are trying to poach to give up so much time? (Or should you give them a $250 Starbucks gift card or something similar for their time?) 2 - Can you really ferret out cheating? I had a grad school classmate who paid someone to do his…

1 - We don't expect anyone to give up this much time. I realize that it's a big ask. However, a lot of programmers we've spoken too really want this option. Anyone who does not want to is totally free to go with the (faster) regular interview. Either they let is watch them code for a short time, or they code for a longer time on their own.

2 - I can't say for sure (we're only just launching this), but I hope (and think) that talking with someone for 45-minutes about the project that they did will be enough to make sure that they actually did it themselves

Re: Take-home interviews

#24

Post by vonmoltke »

mathattack wrote: post #16

I like these great in concept. When I've been between jobs, I've been very happy to participate in them. A couple open questions: 1 - Is it reasonable to expect a 10x programmer whom your are trying to poach to give up so much time? (Or should you give them a $250 Starbucks gift card or something similar for their time?) 2 - Can you really ferret out cheating? I had a grad school classmate who paid someone to do his…

> 2 - Can you really ferret out cheating? I had a grad school classmate who paid someone to do his (non-programming) take-home homework for a job interview, and he got the job. He only lasted 6 or 7 months, but it was enough to be awful for all parties involved. I don't have a great counter-solution other than ask for someone to come in to the office to do the work, and even then you can't tell if they have remote support.

Personally, I think this is where the skill of the interviewer comes in. A skilled interviewer can bust through bullshit fairly quickly. A big problem in interviewing and hiring right now is that most of the interviewers are not skilled. Thus, companies try to come up with processes and metrics that (theoretically) remove the interviewer skill from the equation. Unfortunately, this seems to be done in a horribly unscientific manner.

Re: Take-home interviews

#25

Post by ammon »

TranquilMarmot wrote: post #22
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…

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…

Those sound like really bad take-home questions. I hope that better questions will improve the experience

Re: Take-home interviews

#26

Post by beering »

One thing that a local company did was to give a simple programming assignment (given postgres database connection info, create simple REST API using any language). They would switch up the details of the assignment for each candidate (e.g. different endpoints for same set of tables, different tables, etc.) to combat cheating.

The applicant was expected to be able to answer questions about the code anyways, so hopefully that would've been an effective layer of protection as well. Don't know if this company is still doing it.

Re: Take-home interviews

#27

Post by hibikir »

mathattack wrote: post #16

I like these great in concept. When I've been between jobs, I've been very happy to participate in them. A couple open questions: 1 - Is it reasonable to expect a 10x programmer whom your are trying to poach to give up so much time? (Or should you give them a $250 Starbucks gift card or something similar for their time?) 2 - Can you really ferret out cheating? I had a grad school classmate who paid someone to do his…

If you read the article, the second part of the interview is doing more work on top of the project, but in front of people. I've gone through interviews like that before. Do two steps on a three step kata in front on your own time, and then a 2/3 hour interview to talk about what you wrote, and add the last piece to the kata. Not very easy to fake.

Any experienced programmer that is considering a job change will spend more than a few hours on the process anyway, in due diligence. If anything, I think this is an important part of gaining experience in the field: You actually want more time around future employers, to avoid a bad fit. Going to a place just to quit in 3 months time is a waste of your own time. Investing an extra few hours, or even few days, makes a lot of sense.

Re: Take-home interviews

#28

Post by sytelus »

How does this work if candidate has experience in, say, backend, but haven't worked much on frontends or mobile apps etc? A specific "take home" task puts those candidates at advantage who have already worked in related area, have written code that they can immediately reuse or are experienced in frameworks that allows them to fast trek. This would be great if the job also required exact same capabilities for the foreseeable future from the candidate. However it would overrate or underrate the candidate if the job requires candidates to work on diverse set of problems in long run (for example, switching from MySQL to graph problems). It would be interesting if article also gave few examples of such "take home" tests.

Re: Take-home interviews

#29

Post by bjones22 »

TranquilMarmot wrote: post #22
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…

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 kind of experience on a potential applicant.

I feel their is a major gap between junior and senior developers. And in this environment a junior developer has zero leverage with the companies he/she applies to. So they treat us like cattle.

It's like with every generation gap, their isn't much point blaming those who came before us. We can only do the best we can and make an effort not to replicate their mistakes. The next class(es) of software engineers have to improve and be better then the ones before them.

I'm preaching, but I hope you get what I mean.

Re: Take-home interviews

#30

Post by mjn »

ammon wrote: post #25
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…

Those sound like really bad take-home questions. I hope that better questions will improve the experience

I wonder if borrowing some experience from professors who use a take-home exam format might be a way to improve the quality. The college I went to (http://www.hmc.edu) heavily uses take-home exams, and it definitely seemed like a skill to write a good one. Not everything works well in that format, but it's possible to use it effectively.
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