211–220 of 295 posts
As many other parts of an interview, I've always found the blackboard coding session extremely strange. When was the last time you coded in TextEdit with no docs around, no time to think, standing up, and being watched over the shoulder?
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…
This might even be an underestimate. In my experience, there is a lot of research time that goes into the problem before you really dig in and start coding. I had one take-home project that required a few days just to get my system configured to begin testing code (collecting the dataset [10's of GB], installing libraries, and configuring the system).
>I've seen applicants receive friends'/roommates'/spouse's help on take home tests.
I enjoy overtly mathematical problems, so I've talked through a number of take-home interview questions with friends during the research phase, and even provided implementations for comparison and review after they've returned them. (Most recently on a take-home challenge to generate digits of pi.)
>But the company just took 10 minutes to arbitrarily reject your application.
This is actually my second biggest gripe as an applicant. I spend a couple of hours building and submitting the most compelling application I can for a job. The worst so far was an automated email response that my application had been forwarded for review, and before I finished reading the automated response I got a rejection email from the hiring manager. The emails are literally two minutes apart in my inbox. It is incredibly frustrating to put so much time into applications when they are clearly being summarily rejected.
(For anyone curious, my biggest job search gripe is not receiving any kind of firm decision...ever. I can appreciate that there "is not a good fit at this time", but I'm not going to be sitting here in six months pining for that job I applied for with your company. If I want to show interest, I'll apply again in a year or so. It's actually mildly frustrating when I get a callback three months later.)
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…
I agree. I've done really good ones and really bad ones. A good test started in the office with the hiring manager. Really them just watching me write a simple CRUD app in asp.net when it was all the rage. This was for an entry level gig and was actually a really good test. At the end they had an additional feature for you to add from home. It took a couple hrs and ended up being a great test to find decent entry lev…
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…
I agree. I've done really good ones and really bad ones. A good test started in the office with the hiring manager. Really them just watching me write a simple CRUD app in asp.net when it was all the rage. This was for an entry level gig and was actually a really good test. At the end they had an additional feature for you to add from home. It took a couple hrs and ended up being a great test to find decent entry lev…
I almost walked out, but the salary was stupid high. Didn't
get the job. Thinking back on it, maybe it was just a test
and they did want me to say it was ridiculous.
- They are being unintentionally stupid by asking you to do this activity.
- If they are intentionally asking you to do a stupid thing and they expect you to revolt in the interview and decry the madness. How does that make you feel about your future day-to-day life at that organization?
In both cases those are not good "A-player" types of people to work for.
No need to torture yourself over more favorable prospects "lost" :)
Take-home interviews are a perfect match for startups - they really reflect actual working conditions. One way or another, you'll be taking home your work every day! :)
We (Sauce Labs, Mobile Team) are experimenting with take-home tests as a first-contact screen. I'm familiar with the take home exam that takes a week to solve, so we went in a different direction. We schedule time with candidates, send it to them at the right moment, and expect them to send in a solution two hours later. Before we tried it on candidates, we all did our own test, and we confirmed it could be done in l…
One thing I always found interesting in these discussions is how the same people who are quick to cite The Mythical Man-Month when it comes to the futility of adding new people to a late project will also claim that working 1-3 hours on some trivial problem is "doing free work" for a company. How much value do you think your 3 hours of work with absolutely no context can possibly add to the company? A company trying…
And anecdotally, 1-3 hours is...optimistic.
My test involves a basic task (that is related and already implemented in our codebase). You have to check out a skeleton project, add the solution, build it, and deploy it. The test takes me about 30 minutes and most applicants spend 60-90 on it. Everyone on the team reviews the test and the criteria is essentially "do you want to work with this person". It's very rare for someone to pass the test (which occurs between a phone screen and an in-person interview) and not get an offer. The exceptions have all been around compensation issues.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I remember later on I wrote a script that listened to git hooks and rebuilt my project on a remote server. I was still testing manually at that time, as we all do in the beginning, which resulted in a large number of commits so that I could view the results on the server.
I think it's ok to ask "why do you have so many commits?" but not "why do you have so many commits?!?!?!". It's also not ok to ASSUME that a large number of commits is a bad thing automatically, unless you have reasons far better then any submitted in this thread.
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…
I agree. I've done really good ones and really bad ones. A good test started in the office with the hiring manager. Really them just watching me write a simple CRUD app in asp.net when it was all the rage. This was for an entry level gig and was actually a really good test. At the end they had an additional feature for you to add from home. It took a couple hrs and ended up being a great test to find decent entry lev…
If that was the case ... then you don't want to work there. I've worked with a few business people that intentionally filtered interviewees by strange characterists. [Aka... graphic designers that were juinor, but didn't have web dev experience (I want to say it was something stranger than that)]