Take-home interviews • Hacker News Board

Re: Take-home interviews

#201

Post by bradleyjg » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 1:31 AM UTC

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…

If you only supposed to take three hours why not set it up like a take home test? Set up a site where you can download it and then you have three hours to upload the answer?

Re: Take-home interviews

#202

Post by nsfyn55 » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 1:36 AM UTC

kwi wrote: post #173

nsfyn55 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Founder here. We definitely don't and the outcome of both tracks will be treated exactly the same way. As Ammon wrote it: "Anyone who passes our take-home project assessment will get exactly the same service from us as people who do the regular interviews. We'll work hard to find several YC startups they'd be a great fit for, fast track them through the hiring processes, and handle all logistics of flights/accommodat…

zing! you got me. I only skimmed the first paragraph. Nah sounds cool. I wish you the best of luck. Let us know if it works.

Re: Take-home interviews

#203

Post by jghn » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 1:37 AM UTC

burger_moon wrote: post #127

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…

After doing a handful of these and rejecting several handful of these tests I'd like to add a little to you comment. I agree that the time it takes is always muchuch longer than what they state. Companies that offer these tests before doing an initial phone screen get that email deleted. Why would I as an applicant who is applying to 10+ jobs spend time doing this test when I have never even had a chance to interact…

We ask for either work samples or offer the ability to take a take home test. We prefer the former but understand that's not always feasible. If they choose to do the latter we make it clear that it's designed for ~1hr but they can feel free to spend as much or little time as they want. It's not difficult and is really a glorified fizzbuzz, really we're just trying to ascertain if this person can code at all. This is after HR does an initial screen but before one gets into the real engineering group.

Re: Take-home interviews

#204

Post by jghn » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 1:39 AM UTC

Schwolop wrote: post #191

burger_moon wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After doing a handful of these and rejecting several handful of these tests I'd like to add a little to you comment. I agree that the time it takes is always muchuch longer than what they state. Companies that offer these tests before doing an initial phone screen get that email deleted. Why would I as an applicant who is applying to 10+ jobs spend time doing this test when I have never even had a chance to interact…

The best take-home interview I ever did had a time-limit. And of course, I panicked when getting close to that limit, and tried my best to tidy up my solution but didn't really manage. Then a pop-up appeared asking "Would you like another 5 minutes?" That was just enough time to calm down, tidy up sufficiently, and submit clean code. It seemed like a good middle ground to me.

The only time I've been given one there was a time limit as it was fairly strict. Frankly I'd have preferred an untimed version but I can see why people would disagree with that.

Re: Take-home interviews

#205

Post by Bahamut » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 1:40 AM UTC

Jare wrote: post #184

Ensorceled wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, if they don't actually expect you to spend more than 3 hours on the task, they will compare you to people who have spent 9 hours on it. Had that recently: they said "spend no more than two hours on it" so I finished in about an hour and 45 that evening and flipped it over. Then they started asking why my 20 or so unit tests only covered the basics when other candidates had full unit tests in the two hour time fra…

If a company emphasizes quantity over quality during the interview process, run away.

Very true - it is part of the bane of take home assignments. Even for someone who can code extremely fast, a lot of the exams aren't realistic with time, and then they are compared with those done by people who put in multiples of the asked hours.

I rather put in those extra hours contracting (worst scenario), doing open source work (lots to be done that advances the productivity of tens of thousands of developers, if not more), into my hobbies, or into my friends.

Re: Take-home interviews

#206

Post by burger_moon » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 1:59 AM UTC

jghn wrote: post #203

burger_moon wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After doing a handful of these and rejecting several handful of these tests I'd like to add a little to you comment. I agree that the time it takes is always muchuch longer than what they state. Companies that offer these tests before doing an initial phone screen get that email deleted. Why would I as an applicant who is applying to 10+ jobs spend time doing this test when I have never even had a chance to interact…

We ask for either work samples or offer the ability to take a take home test. We prefer the former but understand that's not always feasible. If they choose to do the latter we make it clear that it's designed for ~1hr but they can feel free to spend as much or little time as they want. It's not difficult and is really a glorified fizzbuzz, really we're just trying to ascertain if this person can code at all. This is…

I'm a big fan of the work sample method. I have one repo that is polished out and is a good representation of what I am capable of. Most of my code online isn't that nice because I write stuff for fun so making sure I have proper accessibility tags isn't that important.

Now you could debate which is a better representation of my work, the polished dog and pony show repo or the fast and dirty stuff that I push in my ongoing projects.

Re: Take-home interviews

#207

Post by foobarian » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 2:05 AM UTC

matwood wrote: post #110

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…

Wow on the take homes. We have given taken homes that are just slightly more advanced than FizzBuzz. The problem would prompt the candidate to setup a basic build system (at the time in java) and then solve a problem using a couple basic patterns like observer and strategy. There was no real time limit other than we will not have you in for an in person interview until it is completed. Like FizzBuzz I think the take…

It can be said of most common interviewing techniques that they are very good at filtering out bad candidates, but very poor at picking out the really good ones.

Re: Take-home interviews

#208

Post by darrenkopp » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 2:10 AM UTC

This is great, but I feel like take-home interviews are better for a first-level filter. I went through this when I applied to Thoughtworks, but it definitely wasn't the only interview. This may have been because I was in a different state also though, so before they would pay to fly me out, they let me pick out of a few problems and then email them in within 72-hours.

Re: Take-home interviews

#209

Post by nulltype » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 2:19 AM UTC

darklajid wrote: post #175

bhntr3 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, most companies aren't comfortable replacing an onsite with a work sample (or take home.) So, it's just additive. It's not "the worst" in relation to other interview options. It's the worst because it's usually in addition to other interview options. I just stopped doing take homes on my last round of interviewing. Just not worth it. It was always just added work. It never replaced a stage of the proces…

Agreed (and see the linked comment please): If it's not a replacement for whiteboard bullshit, then GTFO. That's insane and maybe 'the worst'. But it's important to remember that a take home exercise cannot fully replace an interview. It can replace the coding part, the whiteboard "and now we ask useless trivia questions" part. But there's no way for this work to replace the "would you fit the team" interview. Others…

If it replaces the "coding on a whiteboard" part then it was definitely worth it to me.

Re: Take-home interviews

#210

Post by nilkn » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 2:25 AM UTC

pd1 wrote: post #200

nilkn wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a completely generic response which is not at all tailored to the above poster's specific situation (since I'm not familiar with the details), but the general idea would be something like this: If you asked someone to do FizzBuzz at home and they sent you a git repo with 60+ commits, you wouldn't be a little puzzled about that? That would seem to suggest they really struggled with it.

That's not really a fair comparison though. It would be more like a typical "whiteboard coding" problem needing a couple commits.

I'm not really sure what you mean. We don't know what the task was that he had to solve. I was providing an example of a situation in which 66 commits could be seen as a bad thing.

For a typical whiteboard coding problem, I also wouldn't want to see 60+ commits.