Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok • Hacker News Board

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#311

Post by rkangel » Fri, Aug 12, 2022, 1:44 PM UTC

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #267

sarchertech wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re setting up a gigantic straw man. There are camps on HN who dislike all of those things individually—you can’t just take the union of everything someone here dislikes and call it the HN gestalt. >do something unfun to get hired I don’t know of any other industry who hires senior people the way we do outside of performing arts. I personally don’t mind putting together a portfolio the way most other creative indu…

> I don’t know of any other industry who hires senior people the way we do outside of performing arts. Shirley, you jest. Doctors are asked to perform "demo surgeries," all the time. Lawyers are asked to argue "demo cases" in court all the time. Social workers are expected to help patients through trauma, in "demo therapy sessions," all the time. CEOs are asked to do "demo IPOs," all the time. CPAs are asked to do "d…

My view actually is that most of the world is actually really bad at hiring, and we spend lots of time complaining about the tech world doing it but that's because the tech world tries a lot harder.

This is anecdata, but based on talking to my wife and friends who work in other industries most recruitment is pot luck. They interview the candidate for 1 hour, maybe 2, don't have any consistency in what they're asking and no standard criteria for 'good enough'. It's all subjective and down to the interviewer (maybe two of them if you're lucky). You then get stuck with a proportion of your staff who are dead weight.

I'm not sure of the reasons why the technology sector cares more. Possibly because the difference between "good" and "bad" is much bigger - maybe not the mythical 10x, but more than the difference between one accountant and another. Or maybe it's just that these are all newer companies who don't have the older ideas holding them back and have discovered a better way to be profitable.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#312

Post by lapcat » Fri, Aug 12, 2022, 1:44 PM UTC

hawk_ wrote: post #289

lapcat wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've worked on a couple of teams that hired solely on the "strength of the résumé," > We realized they were just good interviewers It sounds like they didn't hire solely on the strength of the résumé, because then wouldn't interview performance be irrelevant? In contrast, there are people with strong résumés who don't interview well, regardless of the interviewing method. > The two people I know we hired on that ba…

Good luck hiring and then firing incompentent people (and there are many such "programmers") at scale. At least by making interviews hard you're not putting families at risk which you would by hiring people to fire them with pretty high odds.

> you're not putting families at risk which you would by hiring people to fire them with pretty high odds.

I'm not sure what you mean by putting families at risk?

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#313

Post by motive » Fri, Aug 12, 2022, 1:45 PM UTC

drawkbox wrote: post #280

jerf wrote: post #76

According to the HN gestalt, you shouldn't do a whiteboard interview because that's too unrealistic because nobody programs on a whiteboard, you shouldn't expect programmers to code with their laptop in an interview because that's too much pressure and also unrealistic, you shouldn't expect programmers to be willing to do a take home exam because that's too much work without money (and if people did pay, the complain…

Contract to hire is the way to go, even if a short time. Most jobs are like that anyways, the first weeks/months are still part of the hiring process. This tests the worker in the actual environment. The contract could even be remote and sectioned off from the larger enterprise, just like any contractors added currently. The important part of contract-to-hire is it shows how the person will communicate while working,…

I agree with you but sadly this model isn't viable in the U.S. due to healthcare and employment being tied together.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#314

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Aug 12, 2022, 1:46 PM UTC

jeroenhd wrote: post #208

datalopers wrote: post #50

It’s odd to me how people complain so much about being asked to write code (whiteboard, take-home, leetcode puzzles) in order to land a coding job. Is a prospective employer supposed to suss this out entirely through verbal questions?

Have you ever heard of a restaurant having applicants mix drinks behind the bar for an hour to see if they're really as good as they claim to be? How many administrative offices have their applicants perform regular tasks on dummy data sets? And, the other way around: how often do applicants have their prospective team lead perform an hour of work for them, to see if the company is a decent match? I think these tests…

[deleted]

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#315

Post by risyachka » Fri, Aug 12, 2022, 1:47 PM UTC

jerf wrote: post #127

sarchertech wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re setting up a gigantic straw man. There are camps on HN who dislike all of those things individually—you can’t just take the union of everything someone here dislikes and call it the HN gestalt. >do something unfun to get hired I don’t know of any other industry who hires senior people the way we do outside of performing arts. I personally don’t mind putting together a portfolio the way most other creative indu…

"You’re setting up a gigantic straw man." And called it the HN gestalt. Pretty sure I labelled it with what it is right up front. Nevertheless, I do think there are quite a few individuals who have an unexamined (in the philosophical sense) assumption that they just shouldn't have to do anything to get hired. I bet most of them, if they examined it, would realize that it's not a sensible assumption. I think it sneaks…

Most devs have a shit ton of projects, code etc to show. This is way more than enough to estimate skill level and bypass leetcode memorization performances and 90% of other tech elements of interview.

Corps basically just offload this work on the candidate as this is obviously cheaper and more convenient, instead of spending time and looking into his profile.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#316

Post by rkangel » Fri, Aug 12, 2022, 1:48 PM UTC

macksd wrote: post #189

bambax wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with tech recruiting is that each company does its own, and so job seekers repeat the process many times with different employers. There should be some kind of test that would be recognized by the industry, that you could attempt once every six months for example, and that would positively assess your ability to code. You would get a score that you could show to recruiters (if you wished to). Some recruit…

You're basically describing HackerRank, and I've worked with some pretty terrible engineers who were very proud of their HackerRank credentials. Write such a test. Give it to all the engineers whose work you know well, and see if it can accurately predict what they brought to your team. I would be very surprised if you could both spot good talent and dead weights reliably.

We had some fairly standard interview questions that I wrote - problem solving type questions asking someone to sketch out a pseudocode answer. One of the smarter things I did was 'interview' several of our existing employees to get an idea of where people would fall on the scale. It was a great help when we then started giving them to candidates, and prevented us hiring some people because no, the good people we had really could solve these problems with only a bit of nudging.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#317

Post by koonsolo » Fri, Aug 12, 2022, 1:48 PM UTC

sarchertech wrote: post #111

jerf wrote: post #76

According to the HN gestalt, you shouldn't do a whiteboard interview because that's too unrealistic because nobody programs on a whiteboard, you shouldn't expect programmers to code with their laptop in an interview because that's too much pressure and also unrealistic, you shouldn't expect programmers to be willing to do a take home exam because that's too much work without money (and if people did pay, the complain…

You’re setting up a gigantic straw man. There are camps on HN who dislike all of those things individually—you can’t just take the union of everything someone here dislikes and call it the HN gestalt. >do something unfun to get hired I don’t know of any other industry who hires senior people the way we do outside of performing arts. I personally don’t mind putting together a portfolio the way most other creative indu…

So how would you desscribe the ideal interview?

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#318

Post by zaphar » Fri, Aug 12, 2022, 1:48 PM UTC

mathverse wrote: post #295

vhodges wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's why we're going to start doing a take home project as part of the hiring process: Last fall I hired a supposed senior dev with 10+ years of experience and watched them struggle for the next 4 months with the most basic things. At first I though it was our codebase (large, mature and complex), but it became pretty clear they had mis-represented them selves. The fault is ours of course, they should never have be…

People seem to argue about the wrong things. I am not advocating for abolishing the practice of take home assignments. Far from it. However it has become a common practice to require from applicants unreasonable amount of time to complete said assignments without any commitmet from the company. That's just toxic. This would not have been such a big problem if companies provided decent feedback on what went wrong with…

I use a take home exercise. It should take at most 30m to 1h to complete. I have a well calibrated objective scoring system for the exercise. It's trivial to figure out if someone copied it from elsewhere. I find it works pretty well at getting the "can they code" portion hiring process out of the way.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#319

Post by elpatoisthebest » Fri, Aug 12, 2022, 1:49 PM UTC

VoodooJuJu wrote: post #291

lbreakjai wrote: post #135

We let the candidates decide: Take-home assignment, pair-programming, or we go through an existing project of theirs, discuss it, and extend it together. The take-home assignment is short. It shouldn't take more than an hour if you really really want it to be polished, which we heavily insist we do not care about. The overall process is a bit longer, because we then discuss it together. For the pair programming sessi…

>Take-home assignment That's fine, pay me. >pair-programming Again, that's fine, pay me. >go through an existing project of theirs, discuss it, and extend it together The SaaS's I own and operate are closed-source and I'm not looking to take on any contractors at this time, but I'll let you know if anything opens up.

What's a fair rate to pay an interviewee?

Should I pay you for an hour of your demanded salary? So somewhere in the $100/hr ballpark? Or some nominal fee, the same across all candidates? $100 for the interview?

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#320

Post by naniwaduni » Fri, Aug 12, 2022, 1:49 PM UTC

lapcat wrote: post #231

naniwaduni wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are enough lemons on the job market that this barely even bears examination. Anyone who's ever looked at a pile of incoming resumes can see at a glance that selecting at random from them is going to get a viable employee with vanishingly small probability. Anyone's who's tried to interview from even a selected pool of those can assume that the actual pool of candidates is overall even worse than it looks on pap…

Filter your resumes however you like before you throw the dart. In any case, the dart throwing method can't be criticized simply because it produces lemons, because no hiring process is perfect. Every company from top to bottom makes bad hires. So you've got to compare the overall results, which will contain both good and bad. One big advantage of the dart throwing method is that it will randomly select good people w…

> Filter your resumes however you like before you throw the dart.

Yes, now your process is indistinguishable from existing hiring pipelines. The darts happen to be weighted in all sorts of ways you don't have full insight into, but hey, so are literal dart throws.

> In any case, the dart throwing method can't be criticized simply because it produces lemons, because no hiring process is perfect. Every company from top to bottom makes bad hires. So you've got to compare the overall results, which will contain both good and bad.

The problem is not that it makes some bad hires. The problem is that you will make >90% bad hires if you don't do filtering, and once you bring a few of them on and word gets out you will be making net >100% bad hires by this process.