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We compiled a library of realistic engineering take-home tests and ranked them

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Re: We compiled a library of realistic engineering take-home tests and ranked them

#91

Post by matthewmacleod »

_odey wrote: post #15

Now take that list, throw it in the rubbish bin and wash your hands thoroughly. Take home challenges are simply an absurd waste of time and a huge disrespect towards your candidates personal time. You ask them to spend 4 or more hour of their free time on a useless, throwaway excersise that you "review" in 5 minutes and you conclude they're good enough because they laid out code the way you like it... You never see t…

Your process seems equally flawed. Many excellent candidates have no open-source code, and if they show you any closed-source code that's an immediate signal against hiring them.

So now you've put candidates through a silly "live coding challenge" – offering an advantage to the sort of person who is chatty and communicative with strangers in a stressful environment and the expense of people who may be better engineers but slower to warm up.

I really wish folks would be way less dogmatic about this stuff. Every single time I see someone say "take-home exercises are bad", their proposed alternative is also critically flawed.

Re: We compiled a library of realistic engineering take-home tests and ranked them

#92

Post by rjh29 »

not_the_fda wrote: post #26

Why would I do any of these? They are a huge time sink and I have plenty of job opportunities without jump through these hoops.

Depends on your target salary and luck. I do not earn a FAANG salary but my interview was a single 1 hour session where I showed them a few of my github projects and talked shop. My impression is most people going for high salaries need to do the leetcode grind and 8+ stages of interviews though.

Re: We compiled a library of realistic engineering take-home tests and ranked them

#93

Post by gchamonlive »

BlargMcLarg wrote: post #79
gchamonlive wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can learn more about you working with you for half an hour than I would ever learn by studying the code That's the problem. I think everyone is too focused on technical prowess and forgetting something just as important which is written documentation and explanation. Pair programming has the downside of selecting people with good interpersonal skills and will tell you nothing about quality of code delivered. A go…

>I think everyone is too focused on technical prowess >and will tell you nothing about quality of code delivered. These statements seem a little contradictory or I'm misunderstanding the context.

Not being too focused on technical prowess doesn't mean being oblivious to code quality, so no I don't think they are contradictory.

Re: We compiled a library of realistic engineering take-home tests and ranked them

#94

Post by iherbig »

chrisweekly wrote: post #77
andreyk wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like this concept - have a one time download link, and a timer to submit solution within an hour or two. Seems like a good balance of fair and realistic (assuming you can't Google for solutions and all).

"can't Google for solutions"? I will never understand the desire to handicap interviewees like that. I recently passed an live-coding interview in which I was asked to use an unfamiliar library; bc it was open-book I was able to look up its docs and use it to solve the problem. At one point I also hopped onto MDN to confirm a browser API. The ability to search and effectively leverage available resources is fundament…

OP was not suggesting that search engines cannot be used as a tool in the process of taking the test. Rather, that your test should not be something which a candidate can Google a pre-existing solution to and submit as their own.

Re: We compiled a library of realistic engineering take-home tests and ranked them

#95

Post by _odey »

time_to_smile wrote: post #62
_odey wrote: post #15

Now take that list, throw it in the rubbish bin and wash your hands thoroughly. Take home challenges are simply an absurd waste of time and a huge disrespect towards your candidates personal time. You ask them to spend 4 or more hour of their free time on a useless, throwaway excersise that you "review" in 5 minutes and you conclude they're good enough because they laid out code the way you like it... You never see t…

Another huge problem with take home challenges is that they are one time use. At least if you're grinding leet code questions you're spending time that is useful at multiple companies. I have a big folder on my computer of homeworks I've finished for various companies over the years. If I recall I passed all of them, it's sort of annoying that I can't simply hand over this list of other projects I've passed and say "…

> it's sort of annoying that I can't simply hand over this list of other projects I've passed and say "here, all of these companies thought this was good".

Why not?

Put them in a repository, and in your cover letter when applying to a new company paste a link to it, and say exactly that.

It's your code after all.

Re: We compiled a library of realistic engineering take-home tests and ranked them

#96

Post by rjh29 »

lelandfe wrote: post #87
yamtaddle wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

That time wording would be enough of a red flag for me, unless I really really wanted to work for that company.

Re: We compiled a library of realistic engineering take-home tests and ranked them

#97

Post by lelandfe »

alexyang21 wrote: post #25
lelandfe wrote: post #14

As there are no tests rated 1 star, I wonder if the scoring is too lax. I've taken some of these – shocked that Algolia's made it to a 3 star. Look at how much work this is: https://github.com/algolia/solutions-hiring-assignment

Yeah I agree that a test that's super long is awful for candidates. We did our best to be objective in grading, so we didn't want to dock more stars based on our subjective opinion on what's considered reasonable. FWIW my team believes that test designers should strive to scope tests to no more than 1-2 hours (ideally 1). The reason why there aren't any 1-star tests isn't because they don't exist, but because we didn…

I guess what I’m saying is that if that is a 3 star, I’m not sure how valuable the rating is.

Re: We compiled a library of realistic engineering take-home tests and ranked them

#98

Post by PUSH_AX »

twawaaay wrote: post #5

As 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…

A two hour coding session is a nope from me, and a lot of talent will feel the same, you're going to miss out on some good people.

You're going to learn little to nothing regardless of whether you're face to face or not. Modern interview processes are an exercise in feeding the other side things they want to see/hear. I'm a firm believer that good fit cannot be determined until the candidate has been in the seat for a month or so.

Re: We compiled a library of realistic engineering take-home tests and ranked them

#99

Post by tharkun__ »

TylerE wrote: post #64
ghaff wrote: post #56

Earlier 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 I'd rather somebody admit that they took longer, say 4 hours to get to the 80% because they were a bit rusty, their IDE on their private machine wasn't as expected (e.g. Intellij CE vs the Ultimate at work), they had to look up how to bootstrap a service from 0 because they hadn't done that in ages even at work etc. than to under deliver a 20% solution in the 2 hours asked.

Limits are fine if you ask me. Give me a couple days in which I can do this on my own time and if my kid needs me for something 10 minutes after I started I can deal with it and just come back to the test an hour later. Specific hours? Screw you, not even gonna start.

Re: We compiled a library of realistic engineering take-home tests and ranked them

#100

Post by magicloop »

My attitude is that take-home tests should be given to candidates if they cannot share work they've already done.

This creates a win-win incentive because it would become standard in our industry to have a portfolio of GitHub contributions, a stack overflow profile, etc. At least those artefacts are helpful to a wider community as well as showing your abilities.

Couple this with an open ended technical conversation with the engineer, progressively drilling down on items they know about to see the depth of their skillset, you will understand the key skills they can present for the job opportunity.

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