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The business of takehome assessments

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Re: The business of takehome assessments

#41

Post by gorjusborg »

mgkimsal wrote: post #17
mewpmewp2 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> maybe I was just a jerk in the interview I will say that this is something you definitely should not be, especially if it's a larger corp. You should be political, passionate, approachable and friendly. It doesn't matter if you are more technically skilled. It might be even worse for interviewers if you are technically skilled and arrogant about it, because it would make their work lives worse. Even though I apprec…

I certainly don't try to be... and I generally don't think I come across that way (rude, arrogant, etc) but I'm sure I've had my moments unintentionally. There's a limit to how much influence I can have on someone's perception, and I know I've said things in the past that have upset folks without meaning to, or just... knocked me out of the running for a particular technical point of view.

That you understand that another's perception can be different than yours puts you in a high tier in my book.

Re: The business of takehome assessments

#42

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

I don't think we'll ever solve the problem of interviewing software engineers.

- Whiteboard coding tasks put a LOT of pressure on you to perform while being watched in a stressful high-stakes situation, which is a situation that the extreme majority of SWEs won't deal with, and many simply can't. They also tend to test for algorithms (inverting a binary tree, etc.), something that is unrelated to most actual jobs.

- Takehome assessments are unfair to those with a family that might not have the free time to do them, and if you're applying for multiple jobs, can easily become a full-time job on their own.

- Performing a 5+ round interview gauntlet is frustrating and absurd, and can make the hiring process take well over a month.

Re: The business of takehome assessments

#43

Post by orangevelcro »

kevmo314 wrote: post #23
michaelt wrote: post #4

One of the major problems with take home tests is the rampant cheating. It's been a long time since I've been on the job market - but even a decade ago, I had third-party recruiters who would forward me a take home test... and another successful candidate's solution, "for reference". And even if candidate doesn't get external help, I'm extremely sceptical about time limits. Nothing stops someone spending 6 hours on a…

> Nothing stops someone spending 6 hours on a "2 hour" take home test I once got rejected from a YC company because I responded more than three hours after a two hour take home test was given. So you certainly could stop them. Doesn't really leave the best impression of the company though. And if you're curious I wasn't actually working on it for three hours, I just started late :)

If a company sends me a take-home, they aren't getting it back any less than 24 hours later. I prefer if I can open it, read it and then come back to it later.

I hate it when I have to immediately open it and finish it, like a timed coding test, although I don't bother with those because I don't think I've ever passed one...

Re: The business of takehome assessments

#44

Post by kenschu »

Founder of new tech assessment company / mentioned in article here.

We're biased, but we think the old form of take-home assessments (+ classic Leetcode tests, etc) are completely broken. Beyond reasons you all mention - they're completely unreliable today in the age of ChatGPT, etc. Way too easy to cheat.

We're seeing candidates copy takehome instructions into an LLM, paste the solution and submit in At Ropes - we're using LLMs to evaluate how candidates code, not just the final solution. So HM's can step in and look at a timeline of actions taken to reach the solution, instead of just the final answer. How do candidates debug? What edge cases do they consider? Etc. We think these answers hold real signal and can be answered for the first time async.

We're trying to make this better for candidates too. E.g. (1) shorter assessments, (2) you can often use your own IDE, (3) you're not purely evaluated on test cases, etc. But we're not yet perfect. If this sounds interesting / you have strong thoughts I'd love to talk to you - email is in my bio.

Re: The business of takehome assessments

#45

Post by [deleted] »

margorczynski wrote: post #5
Rinzler89 wrote: post #2

>I’m 27 and single. There lies the biggest advantage of a takehome assessment for me: I get to spend more time on it than someone with a wife and two kids. I noticed the same thing. It seems take homes are mainly geared towards pre-selecting young single people with a lot of free time to code on the side besides their main job and other responsibilities, or who have no other responsibilities. Now I'm also single and…

I guess an option is going into management, no take homes, DS&A groking, etc. For me personally I prefer it to live coding as I can actually think because there's no stress but usually the "1-2h task" in reality is 8h if you want it done properly (good code, documentation, tests, project & build setup, etc.). If the job isn't top tier it is simply not worth it, at least in the previous market. Still beats memorizing…

[deleted]

Re: The business of takehome assessments

#46

Post by gwbas1c »

This:

> If the very first thing in your application process is a 6 hour long unpaid assignment, then it’s hard to imagine you’re not wasting someone’s time because at this stage you’ve barely done any filtering.

I pretty much walk away at this point. It's like asking a person for sex after buying them a drink. (And if I have to explain why, you clearly don't get it.)

> But if the takehome is offered, say, after 3 rounds of interviews and will be discussed in detail during your final round with a panel of two senior engineers, I think that’s fair and provides a strong signal.

Exactly. That's the point that I'm willing to invest in a takehome.

Re: The business of takehome assessments

#47

Post by OkayPhysicist »

michaelt wrote: post #4

One of the major problems with take home tests is the rampant cheating. It's been a long time since I've been on the job market - but even a decade ago, I had third-party recruiters who would forward me a take home test... and another successful candidate's solution, "for reference". And even if candidate doesn't get external help, I'm extremely sceptical about time limits. Nothing stops someone spending 6 hours on a…

In my experience, the single best question for screening out overt charlatans is a simple "Tell me about a problem you've worked on recently." Everybody engaged with technical work has a few war stories, and they're hard to fabricate without a deep understanding of the domain (at which point they wouldn't be a charlatan, now would they). It generally relaxes nervous candidates a bit, since it's external enough to not feel like bragging, while being self-congratulatory in that candidates almost always talk about a problem they succeeded in solving (and the ones who don't are always talking about a very interesting problem). What kind of problem they describe tends to give you some insight into their strengths, and their general enthusiasm clues you into their interests. Throw in some probing questions if they don't go into enough detail, and you can come out the other end of it pretty confident whether they have technical chops or not.

So far, it's been extremely successful for me in predicting whether a candidates going to get weeded out by the rest of the interviewing process or not.

Re: The business of takehome assessments

#48

Post by tharkun__ »

orangevelcro wrote: post #43
kevmo314 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nothing stops someone spending 6 hours on a "2 hour" take home test I once got rejected from a YC company because I responded more than three hours after a two hour take home test was given. So you certainly could stop them. Doesn't really leave the best impression of the company though. And if you're curious I wasn't actually working on it for three hours, I just started late :)

If a company sends me a take-home, they aren't getting it back any less than 24 hours later. I prefer if I can open it, read it and then come back to it later. I hate it when I have to immediately open it and finish it, like a timed coding test, although I don't bother with those because I don't think I've ever passed one...

This. Email is async. I don't have notifications set up for email. I go over private email once a day. Yes even when interviewing this would only be something like once every few hours.

We can set up a time at which you will send me the take home in advance of course. Like "we will send this to you Friday around 6p.m." coz I told you that this is when I will have time for it.

You send it to me 1:37pm on a Wednesday? Forget it. I am working during that time so I won't see your email and even if I did I have no time for it. I'm working.

In the past I've even written a quick batch file to change all of the creation and modification time stamps for all files to the exact same time where they wanted a zip file. As well as setting the date and time of the git commit to a time before they sent me the take home where they wanted me to commit something to a repo.

It either goes completely unnoticed and that's fine or it makes for a nice technical convo. Meaning if someone notices and talks to me about it it would make it more likely for me to accept an offer because they have people working there already that know and understand such technical details and find them fun too. Vs. most where they would be in shock and awe how such a thing is even possible.

Re: The business of takehome assessments

#49

Post by FireBeyond »

jcomis wrote: post #24

These are/were rampant in product design hiring. Especially "startups" or smaller companies. The direction is always the same "spend max a couple hours!" but the understanding is clearly you must spend significantly more. Some are cute with clearly non work related problem, like a previous company I worked for that did "design an app for a time machine" or similar. But many are very very obviously current problems th…

> The direction is always the same "spend max a couple hours!" but the understanding is clearly you must spend significantly more.

I am in Product now, but when I was in SRE, I got one like this. "We don't want you to spend more than 3-4 hours on this", where "this" was:

Build a log parser for streaming Apache CLF. The parser should:

Keep a rolling monitor of the top 10 requests, displaying their velocity in req/sec as a rolling average.

Display aggregates of visitor counts over the last hour and day.

Have high watermark alerts when ingress traffic as a whole, or to hotspot URLs hit thresholds, and then be able to de-alert when traffic dropped.

Scaffolding to deploy same.

Unit tests and documentation for same.

Ability to ensure URLs were safe, stripped of any GET parameters.

Not overly complicated, but you're not busting that out in 3 hours in any polished manner, if at all.

Allo

Re: The business of takehome assessments

#50

Post by williamcotton »

bee_rider wrote: post #31
maxsilver wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems take homes are mainly geared towards pre-selecting young single people with a lot of free time to code on the side besides their main job and other responsibilities, or who have no other responsibilities. (snip) I question the future of my career in tech, how will I be able to compete for new jobs later when I won't be, and take homes will be normalized? My counterpoint to this is that takehome tests are g…

How’s your career going? I’m often worried that I’ll look like a dummy when I have to look up basic loop syntax. I’m not dumb, and I’m somewhat experienced… I just write code in Python, Matlab, Fortran, Bash, whatever else. It is shocking that the basic shape of syntax can be so different! And also the degree to which it doesn’t actually matter. It’s just when starting a new file. My brain needs a little bit of synta…

My brain refuses to learn bash conditional syntax. Personally, when I’m about to write a conditional in bash I take it as a cue to switch to another language.
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