I like the assignments where a starting project is provided, and you are given a few enhancements and bug fix tasks within the project. That is probably what your first few months will be like at the job anyway. You can match the coding standard of the existing project rather than agonizing about naming standards or other subjective decisions. I have an issue with the more open ended tasks where you create a project from scratch. I saw the directive "make the interface as polished as possible". That is how a 3 hour project turns into a week of work.
We compiled a library of realistic engineering take-home tests and ranked them
81–90 of 190 posts
Re: We compiled a library of realistic engineering take-home tests and ranked them
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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 applied to Dropbox some years ago, and the coding test was an NP-hard problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rectangle_packing
Oh my. Mine was SRE-specific to be fair, and was the kind of thing I'd do for fun to answer "what if..." It was timeboxed to two hours, and IIRC I had a working solution in about half that, then spent the rest iterating and improving.
Re: We compiled a library of realistic engineering take-home tests and ranked them
#83As 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…
Have been doing SE for 10 years now. Got burned on three of these recently because they didn't used to be as common. Talking several hours each one. It leaves you with the feeling that the company is stealing your work. Will not repeat.
Also, one company had me do a SQL take home which I thought was amusing because then one of the employees nit-picked all the SQL code which I hastily wrote because it was already a risky time investment, even though it was a Python job and I'd likely just use an ORM.
I would argue that a truly qualified interviewer should be able to have a dialogue where they ask you very pointed questions and give you maybe a 20 minute coding problem. If they're not satisfied, they should invite you back for another interview. The major drawback of take-home tests is they are usually very subjective and huge time investments.
I ultimately got 3 job offers, got to the final round at 3 others which had take homes, and accepted one at a FAANG company who didn't use these poor interview tactics but to each their own.
Re: We compiled a library of realistic engineering take-home tests and ranked them
#84The entry for this company Haraj states: >"Just fyi, this submission make up to 50% from your overall hiring score. While your CV only make up to 5%. So do your best to create great submission!" >"UPDATE (2022-02-05): Due to many great candidates have applied to this vacancy, we decided to close this challenge on Friday (2022-02-11). So we will wait for the last submission until Thursday (2022-02-10) at 23:59 WIB." […
People with a bad CV but good skills would do it. There are a lot of those people entering the market every year so it makes sense for some companies to look for gems among the people other companies considers unhireable.
Re: We compiled a library of realistic engineering take-home tests and ranked them
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
And a reasonable response in any case is "Yah, I know you said that but I don't like to do sloppy work and there were clearly a number of different edge cases that needed to be handled for this to work reliably."
That would actually be a huge red flag to me for hiring. I don't want an architecture astronaut who is never going to ship anything. An 80% solution when I need it is infinitely more useful than a 100% solution that's months late.
And this would be the opposite for me. Someone properly thinking out the edge cases and handling them (or at least pointing them out in comments) would be much more useful in the roles I'd be hiring for.
I need a stable system that can tolerate the real world and handle messy inputs without shitting the bed. A new hire that shows they consider their inputs and handle edge cases is a better fit to me than someone who focused on that 80% solution and didn't bother sanitizing inputs and crashes because of it.
Re: We compiled a library of realistic engineering take-home tests and ranked them
#86As 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…
If you give every person on the street 2 hours of your time, you wouldn't be able to do your day job.
I don't like take home tests either, but the point of them is removing the bad candidates from the pipeline so that people who interview them (often ICs, and these are some of the biggest expenses within the company) don't waste time on someone that is unlikely to be qualified.
Personally when I'm interviewing and I get take home tests I choose my battles. I only do them if I really want the job. If it is worth my time.
It's unfortunate, but take home tests are a necessary evil until something better comes along.
Re: We compiled a library of realistic engineering take-home tests and ranked them
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's an absurd amount of work to do for free. Plus, it is useless: You won't learn anything new, it is going to impact no one, and it is going to sit stale at the inbox of 2 senior developers for 2 weeks until it is seen, as a chore. This vicious cycle of wasting time must stop.
Holy shit, y'all weren't kidding. That Algolia task would be many thousands of dollars of work at agencies I've worked at, and I'd expect $1-2k even bidding as a freelancer (yes, just for a mockup of this size and complexity, not prod-ready). That's so far beyond reasonable, it can no longer even see its border. Also, WTF is this about?: > Important: Do not fork this repository to create your assignment. Doing so wil…
FWIW mine was even worse.
It didn’t have a design or business example.
I had to come up with a fake business, explain how Algolia would provide value to them, and make the implementation and design.
Their wording on time:
> Note: We know how time constrained we all are, so the target is to spend no more than 6-8 hours on the assignment. If you do wish to spend more, please go ahead!
And their criteria:
> Evaluation criteria of the demo:
- Quality of relevance settings (eg. searchable attributes, custom ranking, index configuration settings)
- Richness of UI functionality. What kind of controls are provided to the end user to best capture their intent and ultimately retrieve the best possible content to put in front of the user to drive engagement and find what they are looking for? What features are leveraged in this endeavor (eg. query rules, geo, personalization, AI features etc.)?
- Quality of design. How does the layout, styling etc. contribute to the overall feel of the experience?
- Ability to drive a narrative with the demo, connecting how the user experience will drive ROI for a business
Re: We compiled a library of realistic engineering take-home tests and ranked them
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
While this certainly sounds like reasonable criteria for rating a take home, does this truly account for general candidate reluctance to do take homes due to the time commitment? Even 2-4 hours is more time than conventional Leetcode-style initial assessments, and many may rather use that time to interview with 2-4 companies instead of just one. I recently interviewed with Ramp and enjoyed their model of practical pr…
> Even 2-4 hours is more time than conventional Leetcode-style initial assessments, Hard disagree on this one. Unless your day-to-day work includes many leetcode style problems, you need to put in significant time training on leetcode if you want to pass the interview. You should be able to complete a take-home based on your current skill set. Yes, it may take 4-6 hours (or 8-10), and yes, that is a big ask of a cand…
Is your 4-6 hour estimate a total of all jobs a candidate applies for?
Re: We compiled a library of realistic engineering take-home tests and ranked them
#89Why would I do any of these? They are a huge time sink and I have plenty of job opportunities without jump through these hoops.
While hiring I've done a 15min test before an interview (always looking through their portfolio first) that took some candidates 30-45mins. If they fail or took longer than 45mins it ends there. I then do a 30min interview that sometimes take 45min if they talk a lot or ask me questions about the company
How does this sound? I have no idea if this is ideal but so far we didn't hire any more bad candidates than we did using a different process
Re: We compiled a library of realistic engineering take-home tests and ranked them
#90As 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…
After doing a few take home assignments, I've learned many won't give the courtesy of Q&A afterwards; many won't give any feedback by default.
I loved giving live code sessions, the more open-ended the better. Give an objective, explain there's no wrong answers, answer all questions, give answers when asked, keep it simple, and gauge response. I found it exposed attitude and knowledge.