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On asking job candidates to code

philcalcado.com

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Re: On asking job candidates to code

#441

Post by jghn »

ryandrake wrote: post #152
pdxandi wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate this approach. I'd love to be more active with outside-of-work projects, but my days are usually already full. And I can't provide a lot of code samples because the majority of my work is IP.

This is true for most good people at big companies. Your day is already 60 hours long, and your company forbids (via IP ownership) coding outside of work. I fear that most of the interview approaches pointed out in this thread select against people who are already successful at well-regarded companies. Don't you want people like this in your interview funnel?

You'd be surprised. There are an increasing number of folks who get to at least occasionally work on open source projects as part of their day job, and many other less obvious ways of getting a prior sample. But if they don't have one we don't hold it against them for the reasons you cite

Re: On asking job candidates to code

#442

Post by cheez »

MangezBien wrote: post #421

Interesting. I applied to DO about ten weeks ago. I had an initial phone screen, and they sent me a code challenge. I completed and turned in the challenge. Then I heard nothing for two weeks. I reached out to my contact there, and she got back to me a week later saying, "I've been waiting on feedback - sorry it's taking so long! I just pinged the manager again this morning." That was the last I heard from DO. I feel…

Yep, companies are really abusing the take home. A long time ago, when I was actually bothering with interviewing, I would ask for $1-2K depending on the size of the problem.

If it was about 10 hours, $1K was usually OK. I never had a problem asking for this, but the problem is that so many companies are doing it now that they cannot afford to pay everyone.

Re: On asking job candidates to code

#443

Post by rplst8 »

blakeyrat wrote: post #422
seanp2k2 wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious what you're doing that you never have to even reference GitHub or SO. That seems strange to me in 2016, unless e.g. You're only using some language / framework / libraries that your company made / paid libraries / .NET and all the documentation and ecosystem is private.

I've attempted to use StackOverflow, but by the time I have questions difficult enough to go there they're well above the level that SO is capable of answering. (At least, not without bribing people with rep, which I don't have because I don't use StackOverflow.) So it's pretty useless to me. As for GitHub, I've downloaded libraries from it, but I have a pretty healthy dislike of Git, which is awful, and refuse to us…

Git is awful?

Re: On asking job candidates to code

#444

Post by kafkaesq »

SilasX wrote: post #390
kafkaesq wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm -- I'm not you, and I wasn't there. But something tells me you're looking at this (retroactively) as a "glass half-empty" thing. As in: "they must have seen some big negatives in me, otherwise they wouldn't have asked that question, about [past history]." Whereas you could have also looked at it this way: "They must have seen some big positives in me, being as they asked me to come talk to them, knowing full well…

You're talking about this like I'm some charity case. Again, I don't have trouble finding interest or applying elsewhere and I don't depend on anyone seeing enough "goods" to take a chance on some bum.

Well it sounded like you were having some regrets about what that happened. So perhaps I misinterpreted things.

Re: On asking job candidates to code

#445

Post by brobinson »

MangezBien wrote: post #421

Interesting. I applied to DO about ten weeks ago. I had an initial phone screen, and they sent me a code challenge. I completed and turned in the challenge. Then I heard nothing for two weeks. I reached out to my contact there, and she got back to me a week later saying, "I've been waiting on feedback - sorry it's taking so long! I just pinged the manager again this morning." That was the last I heard from DO. I feel…

After having this happen a few times during my job hunt a few months ago, I decided I won't do any take-home coding tests if they take more than 2-3 hours. Even if you get great feedback on your work, there's still a very high chance that the company will just go radio silence on you. This seems to happen especially frequently with smaller startups.

Re: On asking job candidates to code

#446

Post by overgard »

codingdave wrote: post #124
vblord wrote: post #32

When we hire, after a few phone interviews we give the programmer an in person coding exercise that is very basic. Open a file and parse data, etc... They can use the internet. It's very basic. 80% of the candidates cannot do that. I'm not exaggerating. Maybe I'm missing something here, but it's pretty astonishing to me.

That does not surprise me -- many web developers only do web development. They use frameworks for database access, and rarely, if ever, do direct file access. And parsing data? There are libraries for that, right? Sure, you would think that would be a trivial task for a professional coder. But it is amazing how much you can accomplish without ever having to do anything other than model some data, write some business…

I don't doubt what you're saying, but in my opinion, if you can't write code outside of your chosen framework... you can't write code. It would be like calling yourself a mathematician because you passed 8th grade algebra. You learned some math tools, but you didn't learn math. (Not you specifically of course, the hypothetical "you")

Parsing data is a very low barrier to entry. Likewise, a person that can write an ORM data model without understanding the basics of a database is a disaster waiting to happen. If you don't understand the primitives you're working with, you're hopeless when the abstractions you use inevitably break down.

Re: On asking job candidates to code

#447

Post by devonkim »

ThrustVectoring wrote: post #378
ctdonath wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's #3 that makes all the difference: a task that means something, and makes it worth one's while. Duolingo wanted a functioning nontrivial (albeit sparse) app, expected to take 10 hours to write. I found it amusing on its own, but interviewed & got multiple offers elsewhere in less time.

That's actually harmful for getting quality candidates - "hot" prospects nope out of the process when they get an offer elsewhere. A clever option is emailing the recruiter at Duolingo with something like "hey, I've got a competing offer, so the 10 hour coding challenge is really not something I have time for at the moment. Is there any other way to proceed through the hiring process?" Either way they answer, you're…

I did that before during an interview with a pretty good company overall and the employer refused to accelerate the process or make an exception and just stopped the process.

Re: On asking job candidates to code

#448

Post by kafkaesq »

huehehue wrote: post #428
spike021 wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'd love to say "don't worry, you'll get a chance to prove yourself", but I can verify the instant rejection. Sample size of one, but I dropped out of a top public school, immediately started working full-time x 1.5, and ended up with a resume that my now-graduating colleagues are blown away by. A few top companies (Google and Yelp! included) have flat out refused to screen me based on no other conversation than "Oh,…

Hell, I interned for a large bank and received a great job offer which was promptly rescinded after the right manager found out what everybody else already knew.

Yeah, banks (and many big companies) are like that.

Re: On asking job candidates to code

#449

Post by rhizome »

ClayFerguson wrote: post #415
hnrodey wrote: post #41

I'm going through the interview process this week at two different companies. One of the companies I found through an ad on Stack Overflow whereby they publish two programming "exercises/puzzles" with the opportunity to earn $100 for a correct answer to each puzzle ($200 total for two correct answers). While I spent more than eight hours on both puzzles, I found them to be thought provoking and I learned stuff in the…

What these companies have successfully done is weed out all the great devs who value their time very much. Those who are desperate for a job will spend the 8hrs it takes on these silly tests and make it thru the process. Good developers who can take their choice of jobs will just ignore these companies who think they are being clever to require a test, and just move to some other company what is not showing signs tha…

What these companies have successfully done is weed out all the great devs who value their time very much

I'm not sure I understand this. A dev who valued their time very much would already be working at a job they liked enough not to be looking. As job satisfaction declines, time opens up to work on whatever you want to call this, a technical feeler, perhaps. A dev who values their time wouldn't get snowed under by a ton of these because they wouldn't be applying willy-nilly, only to those places they want to work.

Re: On asking job candidates to code

#450

Post by kafkaesq »

spike021 wrote: post #310
w8rbt wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'.

Here is the screenshot I took at the time: http://i.imgur.com/FXEHuhc.png

"This applicant went to some cow-tipper school called the University of Illinois at Chicago. Claims he had as a thesis supervisor some guy named Daniel Bernstein for his cryptography project... eh, put him in the 'Other' pile. And when he turns in his 8-hour take-home, make sure it's perfect."
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