I love take-home assignments. Especially reasonably scoped ones. They allow me to show off my skills. However, my opinion is that it should be paid labor. Give me a day of work and pay me to do it. This values my time, it actually doesn't add all the much more to the hiring expense (all that engineer interview time, resume review time, etc is expensive!), and it makes sure you are screening out early and often and not wasting 20 people's time doing a bunch of take home work for one dev position.
I turned my interview task for Google into a startup
561–570 of 615 posts
Re: I turned my interview task for Google into a startup
#562Why is Googleʼs design so bad then if they have such a tough interview process? Corporate structure/culture kills even best-of-the best talentʼs initiative? I think, what they need is non-conformism. But they donʼt select presumably for non-conformism during interview. They select for obedience. (Just thinking out loud) When Google (having so much resources) will release a product whose UI would make people say, “wow…
Clearly this is subjective, but I'm regularly impressed with Photos and Maps. Thoughtful, subtle, and yet informative. With some delightful interactions.
Re: I turned my interview task for Google into a startup
#563The rule of thumb I subscribed to: have the interviewer(s) do the interview. Give the candidate 3x time to do it that the in-house people took. Or, framed in reverse, if you want the assignment to take and n minutes or hours, give yourself n/3 to complete it, and however far you get is the bar for the assignment. Interviewees are stressed, maybe outside their domain, and other things. Make something that they can sho…
My high school physics teacher did the same. He would take the tests he prepared himself to check whether the scope was appropriate for the allocated time. The factor of 3 was spot on for this kind of estimation.
I normally find 3 to be an insufficient factor for exams.
I normally choose divide by 10 for exams as I could do divide by 3 for exams from a different professor/class.
I know the material cold, know the test cold, and don't have to worry about hidden traps--so I expect to take less than 1/10th the time of a student.
Re: I turned my interview task for Google into a startup
#564Earlier quoted context omitted.
White-boarding is not silly and it's why the best companies in the world do it.
Define "best". Not everyone wants to work for Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc.
Whether or not 'everyone' wants to work there is not hugely material.
They, and others that do the white-boarding, are 'the best'. They have loads of talent, operational efficiency, ship tons of great products with great innovations.
White-boarding done appropriately is an excellent means to develop an understanding of people's aptitudes in a short period of time.
Here is an example of a Google white boarding interview, it's excellent in many ways:
Re: I turned my interview task for Google into a startup
#565Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is ridiculous. There's nothing wrong with on-site coding challenges, white boarding, and a good chunk of brain teasers. Having people code a small problem might be by far the best way to understand how they can do the job. "If having years of experience and a GitHub don't demonstrate to you that I can write code, " Your Github code does not demonstrate what people are looking for.
> There's nothing wrong with on-site coding challenges, white boarding, and a good chunk of brain teasers. If a company is looking for the kind of candidate that can and wants to work through those problems, then by all means they should do it. I personally don't recommend those kinds of companies because I'm unconvinced that on-side coding challenges and white boarding do much more than to weed out the really unqual…
"I personally don't recommend those kinds of companies "
You wouldn't recommend Google, Microsoft, Facebook and a host of the best companies in the world because they do 'white board interviews'?
You're not only working against the data here, you're working against reason: asking people to solve problems that they may encounter on the job is an excellent means of measuring a number of things, even beyond their ability to solve this problem.
There are still quite a lot of 'senior engineers' who actually might be valuable in some specific circumstances, who can't walk through problems or write decent code at all.
This example [1] from Google is really quite good. If you watch carefully you'll see how many elements and opportunities there are for a 'good developer' to shine both technically, and also in terms of communication. And also for 'ok developer' to just do an ok job.
They're not asking bizarre or impossible to solve questions that you'd have to study for either.
"That can be, especially for junior engineers."
No, it's good to weed out 'senior engineers' who think that their experience and 'good relationships' entitle them to a job.
"I don't want to burn myself out doing unpaid work" - an on-site bit of coding is not 'unpaid work' - please don't take this angle that your (or mine, or anyone else's) bit of quick hacky coding is 'work' that could be useful really in any way.
This is different from a '2 hour but really 2 day' take home test which is ridiculous.
"And yet I've been explicitly hired because I had coded something relevant on my GitHub profile"
That's good - and I suggest in many scenarios that may be just fine, but it doesn't abnegate the fact of the matter: that 'white boarding' and 'on site coding' (specifically not big ugly take home projects) are an excellent means to measure core abilities.
"but what you are suggesting represents exactly the type of company I want to avoid for good reason"
Again, the best companies do this for a reason. If you want to avoid a massive tranche of the best companies in the world in various corners and niches then that's a personal decision obviously.
Finally - the most contentious 'brain teaser' - they come in two types: the 'tricky problems with solutions' and the more 'open ended types'.
MS used to ask the former "i.e. a kid, an adult, and a row boat owner are at the side of river and must get across with a watermelon. But the kid can't row, the boat owner won't take the watermelon etc. etc." - these I don't think are very helpful in most cases.
But the consultant type question: "how many tennis balls can you fit on a 747" - these can be enlightening. I was asked once "Quebec separates from Canada, how do you divide the national debt" in a consulting interview. Very good question. Aside from the problem of some people getting nervous, and not being very good 'on the spot' (to which I would encourage giving time to think about it), you can learn quite a lot about people in these scenarios. It's an opportunity for people to think about a problem in different ways, to apply some of their niche knowledge, and importantly to see if they can come up with a very crude, ballpark answer to a fairly ambiguous situation. This might be more apt to consultancy types of situations, but I think there's value in software as well, given the right kinds of questions.
Re: I turned my interview task for Google into a startup
#566Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, adding a button to a codebase is an awful test. If someone made it to an onsite and you don’t know whether they can add a button in swift, something failed in your screening process. If you’re testing how someone navigates a codebase, you can just look at it with them, and let them drive the chat. If you’re testing an engineer for a serious job, do an algorithms test. If you’re testing an engineer for a specifi…
I'll bite, but how do you know it converges to 1/e if no one has figured out why? Your description sounds close to the wikipedia description of the first round of that movie ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/13_Tzameti ), so hopefully it's not just the wrong probability to analyze, but naively, the setup sounds like it would have slightly above 5/6 probabilty of survival for the first round. But some aspects of the que…
I was wrong, my engineer said that derangements are the answer to the convergence.
Re: I turned my interview task for Google into a startup
#567> You have ‘4–6 hours’... No one acknowledges the fact that in reality, you’re about to dedicate up to 5 working days on this task I fixed that problem for my candidates then turned it into a startup: https://takehome.io
Good. No more 4 hours challenges with unlimited scope.
Re: I turned my interview task for Google into a startup
#568Why is Googleʼs design so bad then if they have such a tough interview process? Corporate structure/culture kills even best-of-the best talentʼs initiative? I think, what they need is non-conformism. But they donʼt select presumably for non-conformism during interview. They select for obedience. (Just thinking out loud) When Google (having so much resources) will release a product whose UI would make people say, “wow…
Google products are optimized for action, not impressing Dribbble passerbys. Although, a "wow" UI doesn't have to be mutually exclusive with the goal of completing actions, but the who's to say others aren't saying "wow", even if you aren't?
Re: I turned my interview task for Google into a startup
#569Earlier quoted context omitted.
Our current assessment is about 4 hours and i think that's too long. When i was hired I remember multiple points where i seriously considered giving up. O can't help but think how many good people we lose to an excessive applicant process
Serious question, are you not also concerned about the poor quality of worker you might take on with a less rigorous process? I think I'd accept a few false negatives to avoid the hassle of false positives (in the UK at least, where employment law protects employees above all else and people can be very hard to get rid of if they want to be).
UK has trial periods too though, or? I've been in trial periods from 3 to 6 months, which is ample time to find out if the hire was successful. It's of course still very bad to fire someone during the trial period though (for both wasted effort and employee morale), but there is that option.
Re: I turned my interview task for Google into a startup
#570I love take-home assignments. Especially reasonably scoped ones. They allow me to show off my skills. However, my opinion is that it should be paid labor. Give me a day of work and pay me to do it. This values my time, it actually doesn't add all the much more to the hiring expense (all that engineer interview time, resume review time, etc is expensive!), and it makes sure you are screening out early and often and no…
In an ideal world, the task can be something that the company needed done anyways, further motivating the financial insensitive. Your point about general cost of the hiring process is well taken, but I imagine that companies issuing take-homes are giving applicants the same task, and don’t see a point in paying for the same job to be done.