Give candidates real work & pay them for their time.
https://blog.algora.io/post/2022-04-pay-when-hiring-part-2/
We compiled a library of realistic engineering take-home tests and ranked them
41–50 of 190 posts
Re: We compiled a library of realistic engineering take-home tests and ranked them
#42Why would I do any of these? They are a huge time sink and I have plenty of job opportunities without jump through these hoops.
So there are two possibilities:
- There is no reason to take them and this process will slowly fail over time as companies who adopt these policies slowly push away talent options.
- You are not the target audience of a take home assignment hiring process.
I think it's easy to believe the first since it affirms your world view. Speaking as somebody who has a deep pocket of job opportunities and has taken one of these take home assignments, sometimes those opportunities become stale or you're in a tough market or need a job immediately. A number of companies who have bad hiring practices are still fairly acceptable to work at, even if it's not ideal.
TLDR - to pay the bills.
Re: We compiled a library of realistic engineering take-home tests and ranked them
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Counter-Point. If the assignment is properly sized: no more than an hour. Then the candidate doing it at home using their system and their tools gives you a more accurate picture of their actual capabilities than a whiteboard or doing it on your hardware in an unfamiliar setting with a stranger giving every appearance of critiquing your work. This is an interview after all. The power balance whether intended or not i…
I like this concept - have a one time download link, and a timer to submit solution within an hour or two. Seems like a good balance of fair and realistic (assuming you can't Google for solutions and all).
Years ago I interviewed somewhere that had a system like this. I was told ahead of time only to click the link when I was ready to sit down for two hours to do the work because the clock started then.
Re: We compiled a library of realistic engineering take-home tests and ranked them
#44As an interviewer, I believe take home tasks are unfair and also poor return on investment. Take home tasks incentivise candidates to burn as much time as possible on the task. Consequently, they are a test of who is willing to put a week of work even when the instructions say it should not take more than 3 hours to complete. I prefer pair programming with the candidate on the premise that if I ask you to spend 2 hou…
The two things I like about them from a candidate perspective are that they're async, and that they generally have an actual problem to solve, rather than "solve N-Queens." Some companies (Dropbox comes to mind) have coding tests, but they're async, and they also aren't convoluted Leetcode problems.
I've also interviewed people using both live and a take-home review, and don't have much of a preference there. If the former, I can poke your thoughts in realtime, give hints, etc. If the latter, I get to deep-dive into some of your design decisions.
Re: We compiled a library of realistic engineering take-home tests and ranked them
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Counter-Point. If the assignment is properly sized: no more than an hour. Then the candidate doing it at home using their system and their tools gives you a more accurate picture of their actual capabilities than a whiteboard or doing it on your hardware in an unfamiliar setting with a stranger giving every appearance of critiquing your work. This is an interview after all. The power balance whether intended or not i…
> Then the candidate doing it at home using their system and their tools gives you a more accurate picture of their actual capabilities than a whiteboard or doing it on your hardware in an unfamiliar setting with a stranger giving every appearance of critiquing your work. Or, they don't even do the task, but pay someone else to do it for them, so eventually all these take-home tests just go to the same set of expert…
If I set a take-home test designed to take two hours, and then very clearly tell the candidate to take two hours, and then they clearly spent way longer than that, then I will consider that a signal that they don’t follow instructions well and don’t value their time appropriately.
Re: We compiled a library of realistic engineering take-home tests and ranked them
#46Now take that list, throw it in the rubbish bin and wash your hands thoroughly. Take home challenges are simply an absurd waste of time and a huge disrespect towards your candidates personal time. You ask them to spend 4 or more hour of their free time on a useless, throwaway excersise that you "review" in 5 minutes and you conclude they're good enough because they laid out code the way you like it... You never see t…
As a software engineer with significant experience I think the option to explain some existing code is valuable. This option allows me to show my skill with something that is typically more interesting and demonstrative than a quick coding test. As a professional I also value my time and find explaining how I know I can help with what needs to be done takes far less time and effort than going through a coding test and then discussing that.
Re: We compiled a library of realistic engineering take-home tests and ranked them
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Then the candidate doing it at home using their system and their tools gives you a more accurate picture of their actual capabilities than a whiteboard or doing it on your hardware in an unfamiliar setting with a stranger giving every appearance of critiquing your work. Or, they don't even do the task, but pay someone else to do it for them, so eventually all these take-home tests just go to the same set of expert…
If I set a take-home test designed to take two hours, and then very clearly tell the candidate to take two hours, and then they clearly spent way longer than that, then I will consider that a signal that they don’t follow instructions well and don’t value their time appropriately.
How do you know they clearly took over two hours?
We love talking about productivity here. You're telling me employers will systematically fail the candidates who performed most productively in their process, because of a speculation they took too much time?
Re: We compiled a library of realistic engineering take-home tests and ranked them
#48As an interviewer, I believe take home tasks are unfair and also poor return on investment. Take home tasks incentivise candidates to burn as much time as possible on the task. Consequently, they are a test of who is willing to put a week of work even when the instructions say it should not take more than 3 hours to complete. I prefer pair programming with the candidate on the premise that if I ask you to spend 2 hou…
There are a number of choices.
1.) You can treat it like pretty much any other engineering job and give a "normal" interview, which will vary a lot by company. You probably rely more on credentials than is sometimes the case with software development.
2.) You treat it more like writing, graphic design, video, photography, etc. and expect to see a portfolio. For fields like that, you might talk about thought processes or how they approach their work but the portfolio isn't really negotiable.
3.) In the case of software, you can maybe have someone effectively create a portfolio for the interview but now you're back to someone putting a lot of time into creating something--albeit possibly something reusable.
Re: We compiled a library of realistic engineering take-home tests and ranked them
#49As an interviewer, I believe take home tasks are unfair and also poor return on investment. Take home tasks incentivise candidates to burn as much time as possible on the task. Consequently, they are a test of who is willing to put a week of work even when the instructions say it should not take more than 3 hours to complete. I prefer pair programming with the candidate on the premise that if I ask you to spend 2 hou…
100%. The signal you get from pair programming is enormous. You not only get to see the end product but how they think. Also it's a good gauge if the person is effective at communicating/working with others.
Re: We compiled a library of realistic engineering take-home tests and ranked them
#50As an interviewer, I believe take home tasks are unfair and also poor return on investment. Take home tasks incentivise candidates to burn as much time as possible on the task. Consequently, they are a test of who is willing to put a week of work even when the instructions say it should not take more than 3 hours to complete. I prefer pair programming with the candidate on the premise that if I ask you to spend 2 hou…
How do you structure the 2 hour session? Would be interesting to hear which kinds of tasks you use in a short space of time.
One of my favorites is a code review + take an existing codebase and add some functionality to it or fix some design issue with it.