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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…
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I'm helping hire developers here at HelloFresh and I thought of this a lot. A surprising amount of people don't maintain a very impressive public profile (me included, tbh). These people need the opportunity to showcase their skills and the only way to do so is by spending some time coding a nice solution. We try to minimize the candidate's overhead by providing general guidance in the challenges we issue (like "plea…
Why not just ask them? You're on the phone with them, you can ask them if they'd prefer a little challenge to showcase their skills, or whether they'd like to provide a portfolio example instead. Maybe a bright self-taught college student switching tracks into software would pick #1, a parent switching jobs would pick #2.
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…
> As brain-dead as I was after eight hours at my project, [..] Is giving out an 8+ hour programming project as part of the application process really considered good hiring practice? If you apply to five jobs, you're expected to spend an entire unpaid work week writing code that doesn't benefit anyone? If a company receives 20 applicants, their ideal candidate selection wastes a collective work month? I don't really…
More generally, I think the target should be to make the work sample test take a similar amount of time to the in person interview you'd have to do instead.
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Just to play devil's advocate, being excellent at programming is also only a heuristic for working as a professional programmer.
Sure, but it's O(n) rather than O(n^2). Hiring decisions are hard to generalize, because different companies have different needs at different times.
Won't disagree there!
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How long did it take you to get scripted interviews implemented at Monsanto? How long to actually figure out what the scripts should say? Did your data indicate that the interviews were valuable & if not, how long did it take you to get interviews removed from the hiring process? How much of your time did you devote to building work sample tests or work sample sales funnel devices (microcorruption)? This is at an org…
s/Monsanto/Matasano/
However, I'm happy to work on any real task for a reduced or limited fee. It's a win-win: the company gets to know the candidate under real conditions, has an actual task solved at a reduced price, and the developer does not give away his/her time for free. Plus, if it works out, the candidate has learned already the first steps about the company's system and process and can directly build on it.
I'm always wondering why not more companies do this.
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> Is giving out an 8+ hour programming project as part of the application process really considered good hiring practice? I'd say 8 hours is too long. I always strive for a 4 hours, but I've seen that 4 hours chop 16 hours off of the candidates time and more than 32 off of the companies. > What's the point of maintaining an online portfolio and a github profile full of code The vast, vast, vast majority of candidates…
We ask candidates to pick a work sample of something they already have, if they have one they can provide. If they don't we give them a relatively painless coding test instead. It's not perfect, it'd be great if everyone could have a work sample but as you say that's just not the world we live in.
Yeah, either you pay me for that time, or I'll just look elsewhere.
(And granted, that might exactly be what the company is looking for: a way to reduce the amount of applicants they have to sift through)
Here, do the T branches apply only within computing, like knowing more than one software tool? If so, I think that's not what Tim Brown meant.
Presumably an interview seeking signs of "T-branching" would propose higher level questions, like business acumen or domain curiosity or spontaneous Q&A to better understand or elaborate the requirements needed to solve a representative problem. Otherwise the "T" just equates to broad software skills.