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The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework

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Re: The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework

#371

Post by trowawee »

newobj wrote: post #361
newobj wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can't know for sure that dad/friend/partner didn't write the assignment either. I don't follow what you're implying here, sorry? > How about a 4-5 hours coding rush in the office, where you have to add a few functions or features to an existing codebase? I work at a company where we actively keep a small set of tasks groomed for new hires. It's extremely difficult to keep a set of meaningful actually-in-the-cod…

to trowawee: if it works for you, by all means! my only objection would be if the company is benefiting from your work in some way.

I think that we "benefitted" in some sense, because interviewees sometimes came up with better ways to solve some of those problems. Generally, we extended offers to those people, tho. I think it's just a slightly easier approach than trying to develop useful synthetic challenges - I haven't really seen a synthetic challenge that felt like it accurately approximated what day-to-day life is like in a company, which as an interviewee I am most interested in.

Re: The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework

#372

Post by newobj »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #369
newobj wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO, if you can't land, say, 1 out of 3 interviews, there is a systemic personal problem, not just a bad day, and "the problem is u" -- sadly you will just need to work harder because something in your skill set is not up to snuff.

This ratio depends on how ambitious you are on upgrading from your current position. Imagine arranging all open jobs into layers. At the lower layers are jobs that you can do with your eyes closed. Towards the middle are jobs you're sure you could do, but would take some ramping up. Higher up are jobs that might be more rewarding, and you think you have decent chance of doing them well if you work hard to improve you…

Fair enough. I wrote my comment assuming lateral or slightly upward movement, not a level skip, which I personally would never try to do between jobs, unless it was moving from a little fish in a big pond to a big fish in a little pond type situation.

Re: The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework

#373

Post by learc83 »

walshemj wrote: post #221
learc83 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Most people are not contractors with an established company/legal status as contractors, so you want to hire them. At least in the US, this isn't a problem. You just make out the check to the individual, and then send them a 1099 at the end of the year. No need to have any kind of established company/status, because by default anyone running a business without incorporating or organizing is operating a sole propriet…

Yeh but the rates for these 1099 contractors are so low to what I would expect.

What do you mean? I generally made much more per hour when I was working as a contractor.

Re: The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework

#374

Post by teachrdan »

neurobashing wrote: post #295
teachrdan wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real talk? I'd be concerned that, at a non-tech company, I'd be seen as a IT rather than a software engineer. And the conventional wisdom goes that IT is a cost center. Some of the best career advice I've ever gleaned is to work on something that visibly makes money for the company. I get to do that every day at my tech company. I don't know that I could say that if I worked in a technical capacity in another industr…

Real talk? There is nothing wrong with being in IT. Imagine if someone said "I would be concerned I'd be seen as a carpenter and not a woodworking artisan". You're a carpenter. You nail boards together to serve the business interests of the company. Even if the boards are SQL queries or ReactJS or whatever. Companies need tech. You can bring value by making everyone's jobs better with your technology - sand off those…

I think I've made myself misunderstood. I'm not intending to put down IT work or the people who do it. But from a career perspective, if I want job security and a higher salary, I think it'd be a mistake, in the long term, to be seen as IT. IT is seen as a cost center, which leads to corner-cutting and outsourcing--even when it ends up costing way more in the long run.[0]

0. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jwebb/2017/05/29/british-airway...

Re: The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework

#375

Post by majormajor »

ModernMech wrote: post #285
bearforcenine wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do I do when I quit my current job, move across the country, and then get fired 30 days later? I would likely never accept an offer at a company that tells me up front there is a good chance I will be let go in 30 or 60 days.

You run that risk with any assignment that's at will, whether it's explicitly stated or not.

The size of the chances varies wildly.

There are times it makes sense to do the high-risk ones: devs that are unproven, without great academic and work backgrounds, looking to get a foot in the door. Companies that are not well funded looking to find diamonds in the rough, since they can't attract people who already have proven themselves. I've been that dev myself, based just on a strong sense of how the CEO and myself were on the same page based on our conversations.

But it's definitely not a risk I'd take again from where I am now. At a more established place with people I know who vouch for the folks involved, there's a much lower chance of a new FTE getting canned within a few months for anything short of egregious behavior.

Re: The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework

#376

Post by crdoconnor »

speby wrote: post #218

Our industry's hiring practices are absolutely obnoxious. In an ideal world, you could trust someone's resume. e.g. "I've written large production programs in C." Ok, great, so then clearly this person knows C so there should be no need to dissect code or run them thru some linked list algorithm and see if they know how to use pointers correctly. Yet, we do. Ok, then what about open source contributions (if they have…

>Well, sure, but we don't really know, for sure, if that code is their own or if they indeed truly wrote it, can we?

Passing off someone else's open source as yours would be a hard lie to keep under wraps, an easy lie to uncover and I've never heard of anybody doing it to score a job.

Have you ever heard of this happening? Even once?

Re: The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework

#377

Post by tytytytytytytyt »

trowawee wrote: post #365
tytytytytytytyt wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So hire everyone who can't function during the interview?

I know several really, really good programmers with pretty intense anxiety. Automatically ruling them out because of a poorly-formatted interview process would be a big mistake.

Not if you can find others who are just as good. And what's your better suggestion for filtering out people who can't code and not filtering out the good ones with anxiety?

Re: The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework

#378

Post by rhapsodic »

Clubber wrote: post #312
TheGRS wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm rethinking what I did on my last hiring position. I sent a take-home test that should take about 2-3 hours to those who sent in a decent resume. It filtered out a little over half of the applicants I responded to, as in half didn't respond. It further filtered out a small segment who didn't do very well on the test. A filter is definitely needed to weed out those who are simply casting a wide net, are looking for…

>as in half didn't respond Wouldn't it be funny if the half that didn't respond were the best candidates you heard from, and you threw them away with your take home thing? It's the irony that the thing you did to make sure you got good applicants was the very same thing that turned the best away.

>Wouldn't it be funny if the half that didn't respond were the best candidates you heard from, and you threw them away with your take home thing?

In my estimation, it's not likely that all of the ones who didn't respond were better than the ones who did, but it's likely that a sizeable portion of them were. They're not going to jump through ridiculous hoops because they don't have to.

One time an employer of mine wanted newly hired developers to sign a crazy onerous contract with unbelievably broad and vague non-compete provisions and IP provisions. I told him that the only people who would sign it were people who were desperate for employment, or people without integrity who would sign it without any intent of abiding by it. Neither of which were the types we were looking for. So he relented and we ditched it.

Re: The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework

#379

Post by gnarcoregrizz »

monksy wrote: post #339
speby wrote: post #218

Our industry's hiring practices are absolutely obnoxious. In an ideal world, you could trust someone's resume. e.g. "I've written large production programs in C." Ok, great, so then clearly this person knows C so there should be no need to dissect code or run them thru some linked list algorithm and see if they know how to use pointers correctly. Yet, we do. Ok, then what about open source contributions (if they have…

I'm not sure its just the recruiting side. We're seeing some concerning positions in the market: 1. Expectation of long work hours (Frequent and short deadlines due to agile) 2. Micromanagment being the standard (agile) 3. Terrible environments (open desk/office) 4. Removal of vacation time (unlimited PTO means you have no vacation days)

I'll use this as an opportunity to vent about agile. It promises developers a larger voice, but in my experience, it heavily favors management and product management types, since they are usually the ones in control of the ticketing/tracking systems. They aren't under the sprint deadlines that developers are, so they are able to better organize and build their cases for what gets done. Even if developers can build a case, it often gets sent to the bottom of the backlog. Developers are forced to take on technical debt due to the short-term product oriented thinking. Is this because of the design of agile, or just the misapplication? Considering it's a cargo-cult management technique, I think it is part of the design.

2 week sprint deadlines are entirely too short. say there's a larger project, it takes a lot of overhead to split everything up into neat 2-week releasable pieces. After the slicing and dicing, the big picture gets lost and garbled, adding more stress to developers.

Third, and most importantly, it offloads responsibility and ownership from management (especially upper management) onto lower level employees. Why should managers do their job if agile teams are "self organizing" and "self managing"?

On top of this, I'm not convinced product or business types are better able to design a good product than most developers are.

Re: The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework

#380

Post by aje403 »

reaperducer wrote: post #288
teachrdan wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real talk? I'd be concerned that, at a non-tech company, I'd be seen as a IT rather than a software engineer. And the conventional wisdom goes that IT is a cost center. Some of the best career advice I've ever gleaned is to work on something that visibly makes money for the company. I get to do that every day at my tech company. I don't know that I could say that if I worked in a technical capacity in another industr…

> I'd be concerned that, at a non-tech company, I'd be seen as a IT rather than a software engineer. Depends on the company. Where I am, IT is in charge of maintaining the computers and networks so that the software developers can develop software in and for other departments.

No, that's nearly every company. But if there's 10 software engineers working with 50 MBA's who drive the business, none of them can tell the difference and treat you as such, which happens more often than not outside of a tech company. They are the ones making the company money, and you are the programmer doing that "easy programming stuff for IT nerds". It's not that rare of a situation
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