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On asking job candidates to code

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Re: On asking job candidates to code

#281

Post by mooreds »

dominotw wrote: post #215
ryandrake wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Often the "information sideband" is the very fact that the company decided to cut off all communication as a way to convey rejection. If they treat random people that way, how do you think they treat people who are obligated to be on their worksite every day? Companies: DON'T DO THIS! I, for one, actively discourage smart friends from interviewing at places that treat candidates like shit.

I had nightmare of a interview experience with AirBnb in 2012. They asked me take 2 days off from work and fly all the way to SFO after I wasted couple of hours doing their coding homework. The first interviewer started with "your degree is not from a good school" like the very first sentence right to my face. He then asked me a string matching question, and insisted that I code up his brute force solution (with terr…

It's almost like we need a glassdoor for folks who've just interviewed at companies.

Re: On asking job candidates to code

#282

Post by tomjen3 »

pyb wrote: post #256
vkjv wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A couple of quick notes: * If you don't provide a link to your github profile, I'm not supposed to look at it. This an HR requirement. Other companies may use this same policy. * I definitely look at github, but it's not always easy to tell if a project is original or not. Quite often I'm presented with either 30 forks, or a few projects that seem like they started as some boilerplate. * Don't just provide github, al…

"I'm not allowed to look at it." Uh? Is it a concern that you'd get too much information about a candidate?

You google the candidate. You find a webpage that matches. It talks about the candidates works for the gay/lesbian alliance. You don't hire the candidate because he sucks. He sues your company, alleging that you discriminated against his gayness.

In the specific case it is probably overblown, but HR fears aren't entirely rational.

Re: On asking job candidates to code

#283

Post by kafkaesq »

dominotw wrote: post #215
ryandrake wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Often the "information sideband" is the very fact that the company decided to cut off all communication as a way to convey rejection. If they treat random people that way, how do you think they treat people who are obligated to be on their worksite every day? Companies: DON'T DO THIS! I, for one, actively discourage smart friends from interviewing at places that treat candidates like shit.

I had nightmare of a interview experience with AirBnb in 2012. They asked me take 2 days off from work and fly all the way to SFO after I wasted couple of hours doing their coding homework. The first interviewer started with "your degree is not from a good school" like the very first sentence right to my face. He then asked me a string matching question, and insisted that I code up his brute force solution (with terr…

"Your degree is not from a good school"

Next time they do that, I hope the candidate says whatever profanities they feel obliged to say to the interviewer's face. And then walks out.

By all means, keep posting + telling your friends about this experience.

Re: On asking job candidates to code

#284

Post by p4wnc6 »

thedz wrote: post #69

I don't mind a 2 hour or even maybe a 4 hour assignment, but a project estimated at 8 hours? Yeah, either you pay me for that time, or I'll just look elsewhere. (And granted, that might exactly be what the company is looking for: a way to reduce the amount of applicants they have to sift through)

The problem is, there are no realistic 2-hour, or really even 4-hour, coding projects that faithfully map to on-the-job skill. 2 hours is too long for a data structures riddle, but way, way too short for anything of even a tiny degree of complexity. Let alone writing some unit tests, mocking up a design and then scrapping it for something that makes more sense.

Timed coding tests are just a waste of everyone's time, whether it's a weekend take-home thing, or a 30 minute whiteboard thing, or anything in between. They do not account for individual developers' needs, like privacy, their own editor or IDE, and they exist in this ether between bullshit trivia and an outright working internship that ought to be paid.

The other huge thing is that in a lot of firms (I doubt Digital Ocean is like this, but many firms are) "programming" is a low-status, junior activity. In these companies, if someone asks you to write code in an interview, especially if you are an experienced candidate with a GitHub profile, references, and project experience, then even merely asking you to code is more like saying "dance, monkey, dance" and setting the whole atmosphere of your negotiations and interviews in such a way where you are the lucky low-status person who should be so grateful as to receive a job.

Unless you get a really great cultural feeling from speaking with technical team members first, the best general advice is to simply reject employers who ask you to write code. If they ask you to write code before even speaking with you, absolutely reject. Full stop.

I also think all candidates should fully reject internet-based timed "exams" as well. Things like HackerRank are designed to commoditize software labor, which is a creative design activity and if it even can be commoditized at all, it surely can't be boiled down to data structure trivia that you have to code around in a browser-based IDE with a literal clock ticking down.

Anything like HackerRank immediately screams "quantity not quality" and is straight rejection-worthy, no questions asked.

Re: On asking job candidates to code

#285

Post by im_down_w_otp »

vkjv wrote: post #241
im_down_w_otp wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really, really easy to tell what contributions were made to a project by the person whose profile you're looking at. There's literally a "contributors" section where you can click on them and see every commit they ever made to that project. Also, asking someone to code in front of you is a terrible way to figure out what it would be like to work with them. 1) It's an artificial non-cooperative environment. 2) It…

I over simplified to make a simple bullet list. This is not a "code in front of my while I sit in silence" kind of thing. It's collaborative, it's discussing requirements, strategies, etc. It's back and forth and suggestions. It's also open Internet and questions are encouraged. FWIW, we follow-up on what candidates thought of the interview process and it is overwhelmingly positive. I don't think it is overly stressf…

RE: Your Edit

Hiring is probably the most important thing you can do in/for any company. It should be a time investment on your part. If you don't feel like you're given enough time to do hiring correctly, then I'd suggest setting different expectations with your leadership about how to use your time or what quality of candidate to expect given the time you have.

Seeing a bunch of bug fixes across many projects tells you a lot about that person. So rather than going into the process looking for an extremely narrow thing (like some big project they are the sole maintainer of); go into it looking for anything that's there and see what kind of information is there to help you construct a useful narrative/model of that candidate.

Lots of bug fixes across many projects may not indicate that they can own a singular vision from start to finish (though you can assess that from getting them to tell you a story about literally anything), but it does tell you that they can read other people's code, supply feedback in the way of working alternatives, will take the initiative to solve a problem themselves rather than wait for the maintainer or someone else to get around to it, and focuses on getting things working rather than design-paralysis.

Re: On asking job candidates to code

#286

Post by dublinben »

kozukumi wrote: post #258
mixmastamyk wrote: post #227

Watch the recent coreos post/video, the CTO is probably a smart and nice guy but he looks about 16.

I would have said he looks more like a young-looking mid-20s, no idea how old he actually is, couldn't find anything in my 5 seconds Google search. Out of interest how old is he then?

According to this article[0] Robert Cornish is 45.

[0]http://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/3532520/banking...

Re: On asking job candidates to code

#287

Post by Altaer »

spike021 wrote: post #245
dominotw wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had nightmare of a interview experience with AirBnb in 2012. They asked me take 2 days off from work and fly all the way to SFO after I wasted couple of hours doing their coding homework. The first interviewer started with "your degree is not from a good school" like the very first sentence right to my face. He then asked me a string matching question, and insisted that I code up his brute force solution (with terr…

Nowadays, at least for their engineering internships, they have a pre-filled list of top schools to choose from followed by an "other" option (at least when I tried applying a couple years ago). That told me exactly what I needed to know. I'd be instantly rejected because of not going to a "good school".

I hope this comment doesn't discourage others. I went to a school not known outside of the southeast (and even sometimes not then) and received interviews with many of the top companies (Google, Microsoft, Intel, Amazon, etc), even when I had to check the "other" option for schools.

Re: On asking job candidates to code

#288

Post by w8rbt »

spike021 wrote: post #245
dominotw wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had nightmare of a interview experience with AirBnb in 2012. They asked me take 2 days off from work and fly all the way to SFO after I wasted couple of hours doing their coding homework. The first interviewer started with "your degree is not from a good school" like the very first sentence right to my face. He then asked me a string matching question, and insisted that I code up his brute force solution (with terr…

Nowadays, at least for their engineering internships, they have a pre-filled list of top schools to choose from followed by an "other" option (at least when I tried applying a couple years ago). That told me exactly what I needed to know. I'd be instantly rejected because of not going to a "good school".

Curious. What schools are on the list? Would a CS degree from Georgia Tech do? Also curious about VT and NC State. I think all three of those are 'good technical schools'.

Re: On asking job candidates to code

#289

Post by kozukumi »

dublinben wrote: post #286
kozukumi wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would have said he looks more like a young-looking mid-20s, no idea how old he actually is, couldn't find anything in my 5 seconds Google search. Out of interest how old is he then?

According to this article[0] Robert Cornish is 45. [0] http://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/3532520/banking...

No we were talking about Brandon Philips :)

Re: On asking job candidates to code

#290

Post by tetraodonpuffer »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #249
ryandrake wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> not sure why there is so much resistance here about doing an 8 hour test If you're applying to just 5 companies, that's a full (well 40-hour) work week of effort for a small chance of going forward with the next stage of the interview/hazing ritual. Might be good if you are already unemployed, but incompatible with candidates who already work.

Which means that, if you're hiring, and you want only candidates who are currently unemployed , it's a reasonable practice. But the best candidates probably already have jobs, and you're not going to get them. So maybe that's not really the way you want to do things...

not necessarily, if I am not unemployed I am not likely to apply to tons of jobs, but be a bit more selective, and I don't see finding more than 1 job a week that I would be interested in... of course I am not a typical developer (C, python, back-end, security, networking, ...) so there are a lot less jobs in my niche than say if I was a front-end person

This means that taking every sunday to work on cool / interesting self-contained problems would be great, and much better than spending time revising red-black trees and avl tree rotations and sorts and so on for the n-th time to prepare for the whiteboarding

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