[HN Gopher] Tell HN: Interview take home assessments without fee...
___________________________________________________________________
Tell HN: Interview take home assessments without feedback are
frustrating
I'm in the process of interviewing for senior and staff front end
positions. I've done several multi-hour take home projects now and
a couple were rejected with generic rejection messages. It's pretty
insulting to be frank. Spending 2-4 hours on likely valueless work
is a substantial amount of time relative to the week day. If I've
spent the time making the project and they've spent the time
recruiting me and reviewing the project, the recruiter and reviewer
could spend 5 minutes sending constructive feedback. Anyone else
share in this frustrating experience? Have you successfully asked
for feedback before?
Author : shakes_mcjunkie
Score : 56 points
Date : 2023-06-23 13:47 UTC (9 hours ago)
| theogravity wrote:
| Not one of the comments has mentioned a main reason why feedback
| isn't shared is certain people don't take critiques very well, or
| may think the reason for rejection is benign that it's not enough
| reason to reject.
|
| The company doesn't want to spend time getting into an argument
| with the person over it or potential legal issues arising from
| such feedback.
| effingwewt wrote:
| Then they can interview candidates without the takehome
| bullshit.
|
| Companies refuse to even read a resume/cv these days. They make
| you sign up for an account specifically with their company and
| jump through all their hoops and type into fields exactly the
| information covered in the resume/cv/cover letter. They have
| you write out answers to questions they later ask you again in
| person.
|
| Of companies don't want to spend the time that's fine, but they
| shouldn't expect prospective employees to waste exponentially
| more time. And arguably the job hunter is in the more desperate
| position, as evidenced by the fact we are willing to jump
| through all of the aforementioned hoops. Unpaid. For a chance
| at something. For which you may receive no feedback.
|
| Fuck that it should be illegal to do so unless they compensate
| us.
| theogravity wrote:
| I agree with the entirety with what you've said. Take home or
| not, most are reluctant to give specific feedback in general
| because they don't want to argue about their feedback to the
| interviewee and there is a potential for legal exposure if
| the interviewee thinks the feedback was unfair relative to
| some other group and wants to take action on that.
| iExploder wrote:
| honestly if they dont pay for it or dont provide constructive
| feedback, upload it to github and link in your resume
| ilc wrote:
| I think the real issue is the misapplication of take-homes.
|
| If after 3-4 rounds of systems interviewing, the company came
| back and said: "Hey we like you, and we're interested in making
| an offer, but we want to check your skills..." Yeah, I'd do the
| assessment. Especially if I did 1 round of 45m coding. Without
| that, the company can't verify that I have "FizzBuzz" level
| skills, and that I didn't cheat on the assessment.
|
| When it is upfront, it is rarely worth it on either side.
| Companies lose a large fraction of the engineers applying into
| their funnel, and honestly as an engineer, it is rarely worth my
| time. I can spend that time interviewing at other companies that
| respect my time.
|
| As with many things in life: It is when, and how things are done.
| Not what things are done that often matters.
| arp242 wrote:
| Yeah, this is also my issue. You get a "take-home" after a
| short 15 minute intro call where some HR person basically just
| repeat what's on their homepage and job listing and where you
| repeat what's on your CV (I have a theory that HR people can't
| read, all observed evidence points in that direction anyway)
| and then you're given an 8 hour take-home. Sometimes you don't
| even get the intro call and just an email.
|
| Even just a "hey, we're genuinely interested and you made it to
| the shortlist" or something to that effect would just make a
| world of difference. Now I have no idea if I'm on any sort of
| shortlist or if they're just shotgunning this to everyone. I
| tried asking a few times, but I always got such vagueries in
| return that I might as well not have asked, so I stopped
| bothering.
|
| Would also help if people made the tests at least a little bit
| interesting. Now it's either "do this boring CRUD thing you've
| done 1000 times already" or "solve several NP-hard problems
| that have been subject of Turing awards within an hour".
|
| The last time I spent quite a bit of time on one of these
| things because it was interesting, and even put the result on
| GitHub (with no mention that it was for a take-home test, it
| "just" looks like any other project, also slightly modified to
| fit my needs). Then again, what's "interesting" for one person
| is "boring" for another.
| ctvo wrote:
| If it's so insulting, stop subjecting yourself to it. Let me
| guess, white boarding is even more insulting, because don't they
| understand a developer of your experience can't be bothered to
| prepare for it?
|
| No one owes you anything. If these companies display poor
| behavior during the interview process, add them to a list, name
| and shame, whatever you think is appropriate and move on.
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| I agree. I invested a few hours in a take-home once, while I was
| interviewing for a FT, high-dollar, in-office, position with my
| current employer. I think the only feedback I received after I
| submitted it was, "we've got two other candidates and we're
| moving forward with them and not you."
|
| It turns out that that position was eliminated within 12 months.
| If I'd been hired then I would be unemployed by now. So I'm
| amazed and grateful for my current position, with an incredible
| flexible schedule, 100% WFH, and all the rest. Sometimes things
| work out for the best when we least expect it.
| wgerard wrote:
| Hah, this is something close to my heart.
|
| A friend and I tried to start a company around this, basically
| resolving three big issues we saw with take-homes:
|
| 1) No feedback. If you spend a couple hours on something you
| should get meaningful feedback.
|
| 2) No clear criteria. Is the hiring company going to slam you on
| correct syntax? If so, you should know that upfront!
|
| 3) Time guidelines that had no enforcement and thus led to an
| arms race where candidates would spend ever-increasing amounts of
| time and skew the standard of what "good" is.
|
| So we fixed those things:
|
| 1) We provided the feedback, not the hiring companies, so legal
| liability was non-existent for the hiring companies. We double-
| blinded the process as much as we could (evaluators didn't know
| who the candidate was and vice-versa).
|
| 2) We told candidates upfront what they'd be evaluated on. Not
| down to the level of "you must implement this problem using a max
| heap", but we would say something along the lines of "The company
| is looking for an academic algorithmic solution to this problem"
| or similar. We would then _only_ allow evaluators to evaluate
| them on these axes and nothing else.
|
| 3) We also strictly enforced time limits by basically telling
| candidates "hey you'll have 2 hours to submit from the time you
| hit start and see the prompt, so please make sure you have two
| hours from when you hit start." -- not ideal, obviously, but the
| best we could come up with to resolve #3 above.
|
| As you can probably imagine, the market just wasn't really there
| for this. I think candidates generally enjoyed it in comparison
| to the vague, unending slog that most take-homes are but:
|
| 1) The value prop just wasn't really there for most companies:
| They mostly use these types of evaluations on more junior
| candidates, and unfortunately the hiring market for junior
| candidates is highly skewed towards the employer.
|
| 2) More surprisingly, we realized the time their current
| engineers and managers spent evaluating these takehomes just
| wasn't really a consideration for them. We tried to frame it in
| terms of "here's how much it costs you to evaluate these take-
| homes wrt time spent vs. us", but it was a difficult sell
| regardless.
|
| We actually had the most success evaluating candidates from more
| non-traditional backgrounds upfront ourselves and then charging a
| placement fee if they were hired, but we ultimately didn't really
| want to continue that.
| [deleted]
| say_it_as_it_is wrote:
| Did you sign an NDA about the assessment? Share your work with
| the world and ask for its feedback.
| expertentipp wrote:
| What's the contract between you and the company exactly? Yes,
| they have no obligation towards you whatsoever and they simply
| are pushing the border by probing how servile are you. Make a
| favour to the community and refuse to do take home assignments.
| shakes_mcjunkie wrote:
| I see what you're saying but I'm unfortunately in a position
| that I need to exit my current job ASAP. I don't feel secure
| enough to ask to skip takehome assignments.
| pandaman wrote:
| If you want feedback - go with third party recruiters, they are
| eager to collect feedback themselves and the hiring managers
| share with them more openly than with a random candidate. Of
| course, there are issues with this way of job search (recruiters
| pressuring you to take lowball offers, double submitting, putting
| a negative weight on your application with their fee, generally
| being unable to work with companies that do not work with such
| recruiters, etc) so it might be not worth it. After all, the only
| feedback that really matters is the number on your paystub.
| goostavos wrote:
| What possible feedback are people looking for after an
| interview, though? I've done 100s of interviews throughout my
| time at FAANGs. The bulk of the feedback generated is just low-
| value snap judgements made by people who really don't want to
| be there. It's a dice roll. You either land in a loop that (a)
| has more people that like you rather than dislike you, and (b)
| asks questions you know how to answer, and, by far most
| importantly, that you answer in the way that lines up with
| their biases, or you're dropped as an incompetent rube.
|
| One of my coworkers at Amazon was leaving for greener pastures.
| Before she left, for the lols she showed me the feedback she
| left when she interviewed me. It was something absolutely
| brutal along the lines of "doesn't appear to be able to code at
| all" (I was offended upon seeing this "feedback"!). My point
| being: interviewing is stupid, and, generally speaking, there
| is no valuable feedback to be had from the process.
| pandaman wrote:
| I agree, the feedback often makes no sense (this is probably
| why most companies do not give it to candidates), but if you
| want it - you can get it from a third party recruiter
| anyways.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Everyone does a few of these and gets burned by the no replies.
| These days I'll point to an open source project I wrote. If that
| is not good enough then they weren't interested in judging my
| coding style / sample and more interested in something unrelated
| clusterhacks wrote:
| I strongly suspect you are reading more into the review process
| than exists. There probably isn't any feedback worth having.
|
| I bet the hiring company got a bunch of "fine" or "ok" project
| submissions from candidates and then made somewhat arbitrary
| choices on who they would move forward with.
| harshalizee wrote:
| Yep, been burned by this quite a bit couple of years ago. Since
| then, I've refused to do any asymmetric interview processes.
| Surprisingly, a lot of companies are willing to skip that part
| and go straight to the "on-site" interviews.
|
| If more engineers start to refuse these kinds of "dance, monkey,
| dance" processes, they'll start phasing them out.
| civilitty wrote:
| How do you phrase the rejection to maximize the chance of
| proceeding to the next interview stage?
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| You don't try to. You just say are not doing take home in a
| firm and polite way expecting things to end there and
| sometimes they think it's still worth interviewing you.
| sBqQu3U0wH wrote:
| Sometimes I help to create take-home assessments and provide a
| feedback. It is not unusual for a candidate to submit something
| that is copy pasted from some introductory tutorial and / or
| completely ignoring most of the requirements. In cases like this
| I do not have much choice but to respond with a generic polite
| rejection. Honestly, I don't believe company should be
| responsible for providing any kind of feedback for your
| assessments - it's not a bootcamp. You are either competent and
| therefore suitable for the position or you are not, and it was
| your choice to apply. Moreover, you are not the only one applying
| and meticulously creating a report about what you have done good
| or bad, and where you can improve takes a substantial amount of
| time.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > In cases like this I do not have much choice but to respond
| with a generic polite rejection.
|
| Well, you do have a choice. You could tell them that they were
| rejected for copy/pasting or because the requirements were not
| met. You don't have to do into more detail than that.
| lesuorac wrote:
| Do you encourage candidates to re-apply in the future or do
| they re-apply on their own?
|
| If-so, you're doing yourself a favor by providing feedback so
| that they might improve by the next time they interview.
| shakes_mcjunkie wrote:
| > Moreover, you are not the only one applying and meticulously
| creating a report about what you have done good or bad, and
| where you can improve takes a substantial amount of time.
|
| The report can be 1-2 sentences. It doesn't need to be
| meticulous or a "boot camp".
| lisasays wrote:
| _It 's pretty insulting to be frank._
|
| As are interviews of any kind without feedback. I'm not referring
| to holistic feedback (let alone an explanation for why they don't
| move forward). I mean the kind where they grill you with question
| after question (often poorly phrased and sometimes insultingly
| basic) and don't provide any indication at all as to whether your
| answers are good or bad or not.
|
| They just keep going on, poker-faced - saying, in effect: "Don't
| speak unless spoken to".
| lesuorac wrote:
| > I mean the kind where they grill you with question after
| question (often poorly phrased and sometimes insultingly basic)
|
| I mean you'd be surprised at the number of people that can't
| write a for-loop ...
| lisasays wrote:
| The point is that for whatever level of fizz-buzzing they
| feel they need to - far too often these companies can't fizz-
| buzz themselves when it comes to basic interview hygiene. You
| know, like maybe reading the candidate's resume and cover
| letter (or talking to the recruiter to whom it was explained
| "I haven't worked with language X at all, is that OK?")
| before asking them to code over the phone for language X, for
| example.
|
| Or even post a job req that accurately reflects the true
| needs of the position in the first place. Or (getting back to
| the subject of this thread) when giving take-homes, provide
| reasonable instructions as to what is expected and by when
| (and under some reasonable time frame), etc -- see for
| example this chestnut, posted just now:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36452104
|
| A two-way street, and a bit of common sense. That's all I'm
| asking for.
| michaelrpeskin wrote:
| I'd blame it on HR. I do the the technical part of the interview
| for my company. We have a very easy short take home project
| that's given out after the phone screen. I'm not a big fan of
| take home projects, but they are a good filter. I purposely made
| it representative of the type of problems we solve, but very
| simplified. A junior dev should finish it in under an hour. A
| senior dev in our field could probably code it up in 15 minutes.
| When I review the code, I have a small rubric and also attach a
| paragraph of comments to it before it goes back to HR.
| Apparently, that all gets filtered to a yes/no call back to the
| candidate. I didn't know this until I ran into a candidate and he
| said all he got was a "we're going to pass" call from our HR
| folks.
| lisasays wrote:
| I'd blame it on the CTO, for not knowing or caring what HR is
| up to.
| User23 wrote:
| Ask for feedback in writing before doing the assignment. If they
| agree great. If they don't then walk.
| shakes_mcjunkie wrote:
| That's a good idea. I'm going to try it out.
| jhj wrote:
| I would suspect this is more likely than not (at least in the US)
| due to the problem of legal liability and shielding the company
| from lawsuits alleging unfair hiring practices if detailed
| feedback to the interviewee were given.
| lapcat wrote:
| People always claim this with no evidence whatsoever.
|
| Please cite the relevant court cases.
|
| The irony of these claims is that the possibility of lawsuits
| doesn't actually stop companies from doing terrible, lawsuit-
| worthy things. They do such things all the time.
|
| Occam's razor suggests the explanation is simply that companies
| don't care about job applicants. And this is demonstrated in
| many ways.
| lesuorac wrote:
| People do sue for not getting hired.
|
| https://www.eeoc.gov/newsroom/ruby-tuesday-
| pay-45000-settle-...
| lapcat wrote:
| Yes, age discrimination is illegal.
|
| If your feedback is "You're too old", then you probably
| shouldn't give that feedback to the applicant. But you also
| shouldn't discriminate in the first place.
|
| If not giving feedback is an excuse to cover up illegal
| behavior, that's not a good excuse.
| Ancalagon wrote:
| Yeah just don't do these. Refuse. Usually it's a bad sign. And
| I've only done one such interview where the time commitment was
| what they foreshadowed (about an hour), and then gotten the job
| offer. Every other time it was an email rejection with 0
| feedback. Not worth it.
| shakes_mcjunkie wrote:
| These seem to be the standard for FE roles as far as I can
| tell. Probably 10/14 interview processes I've been in have said
| they have taken home assessments as some part of the process.
| revskill wrote:
| This could be an opportunity for a business to review the take-
| home assignment.
|
| The idea is, if you submit to company A, they rejected without
| any feedback, let's other companies know about it, and both of
| you is in a win-win position.
| cochne wrote:
| Yep. It is now my policy to not do any take home interviews. You
| should do the same. They don't respect your time.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| For every 9 leetcode interview companies, there is 1 that doesn't
| do that and would rather pair program or work on an actual ticket
| together for half a morning.
|
| Adjust your sights on those and it's lovely. More often than not
| those companies are great to work for across all metrics.
|
| Most of these leetcode interview companies just follow what
| Google does for that reason alone. And Google does it because
| they have to cull 20,000 applicants somehow in the first wave.
| They just _can't_ interview that many people from the jump.
| danwee wrote:
| Maybe offtopic: are take home projects or whiteboard excersises
| still needed for senior and staff positions? I had the impression
| that for anything below senior, yes these things were required,
| but for anything equal or above senior, the focus was mainly:
| systems design and communication skills.
| 3oH2y869 wrote:
| I've seen both. In my experience it's been rarer to see a
| process with no coding involved, but it happens here and there.
| ilc wrote:
| When I was interviewing a year ago. They were required at all
| but one role I interviewed at. And I told them to test me
| anyways, despite them wanting to waive.
|
| If you are interviewing as a software engineer, you should be
| able to write FizzBuzz. Yes, it is stressful. Yes, I hate
| leetcode too. But, a company has every right to check that you
| at least know the basic skill you say you do.
| nradov wrote:
| Hiring managers should realize that only the most desperate
| candidates will agree to do take home assessments, or even apply
| to companies with such a process.
| Larrikin wrote:
| Last time I went through the hiring process, I asked my
| recruiterto prioritize companies that had homeworks instead of
| companies that expected whiteboard or on the spot coding in an
| unfamiliar environment with multiple people looking over my
| shoulder.
|
| Leetcode grinding for a whiteboard is a worthless skill outside
| of the interview. I'd rather code up something. If the project
| is over burdensome you can always pass.
|
| The best homework I got was a "working" project that
| purposefully had bad practices scattered throughout. You could
| elect to fix the mistakes or just document them for the
| interview.
| ozim wrote:
| So you would rather do live coding session on a problem that is
| presented to you on the spot?
| JohnFen wrote:
| These sorts of assignments are terrible on many levels and, in my
| opinion, tells you something important about the company and what
| it will be like working there.
|
| If I'm presented with one, I take it as an immediate sign that
| I'd be a poor fit there and move on.
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| Fortunately for employers, there's no shortage of applicants
| willing to take these insults. This is unfortunate for applicants
| who respect themselves, their own time.
| solardev wrote:
| Although I complained about the lack of feedback in another
| thread here[1], I was pretty surprised by the number of people
| who hated take-homes and refused to do them at all.
|
| Why is that? Personally, even though I spent two days working on
| it and ultimately failing it, it was one of my favorite interview
| processes ever... way more efficient use of time for both
| parties, IMHO, and a better way to measure the actual skill set.
| And it was fast! I did the assignment in a couple days and then
| heard back from them in another day. That's way better than the
| other interview gauntlets I've had to run, which usually included
| 3-4 rounds of talking to a bunch of people, with weeks or
| sometimes months in between, and most of those folks are people I
| will never see again after the interview cycle.
|
| And there's also not the absurd pressure and ambiguities of real-
| time whiteboarding or live coding, which is not at all
| representative of how people normally work (with access to the
| internet, their preferred workstation and IDE, etc.). Having gone
| through one of those sessions, THAT feels way more like a "dance,
| monkey, dance" bullet dodged vs the casual take-home.
|
| By contrast, a take-home gives me a "just pretend it's a normal
| work day and show us how you work" situation and I can focus on
| the problem at hand instead of the politics of hiring. Isn't that
| a good thing...? What am I missing?
|
| [1]: My complaint was about the lack of feedback after a take-
| home, not the take-home itself (which was actually illuminating
| and fun): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36446949
| MathMonkeyMan wrote:
| The problem with take-home assignments, I suspect, is that
| nobody reads them. You don't read somebody's github portfolio,
| you don't really read their resume, and you certainly don't
| read their exquisitely written, commented, documented, and
| tested take-home project. If you even skimmed it, you're not
| going to sit down and summarize your impression.
|
| I'm not saying that all interviewers are lazy or bad, but most
| of the ones I've worked with are. Hell, maybe even I am. Time
| spent interviewing is time not spent working on things that you
| might actually be incentivized to do well.
| thesnide wrote:
| Time spent on interviews is time invested.
|
| Now, it is up to you to ensure that you give an accurate
| filter to HR, so you can do focused investments.
|
| And interviews investment is like financial ones. You invest
| in multiple promising parties and expect one to outperform
| the others enough to make a great overall return.
|
| Long story short, hiring is your most important activity. As
| if you don't hire, or worse, hire badly, you won't have the
| firepower when you'll need it.
|
| And if you won't need the firepower, why are you interviewing
| candidates?
| shakes_mcjunkie wrote:
| I largely agree that take home assignments are better than the
| alternative.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| Personally, I have more enjoyable things to do with my time
| than spend a day doing something no one else will spend more
| than 5 minutes on before deleting it.
|
| I'd rather spend a day preparing a D&D game for 6 people who
| will have fun for 4 hours. Once the game is over, we'll have
| memories of a time we spent together.
|
| Alternatively, I've spent a lot of time playing with Home
| Assistant. The end result has been automation I use on a daily
| basis.
|
| That's why I don't like them.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| No HR function that's equipped with the typical level of risk
| aversion is going to allow feedback on why a candidate was not
| selected. There's simply no upside to it.
| shakes_mcjunkie wrote:
| There's always an excuse like this and TBH I think it's lazy.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| The answer? Or the behavior of the HR department?
|
| Candidates are looking for feedback on what they can do
| better. HR doesn't want hiring managers to form opinions on
| that. HR wants (as near as possible) objective feedback on
| whether candidates meet a hiring bar, and for a hiring
| manager to select amongst those that do choose the best
| candidate. Ideally, they want you to make sure you're making
| serious consideration of candidates in under-represented
| groups in order to show commitment to DEI targets.
|
| Oftentimes, the reasons why candidates don't get selected
| come down to things like "you exaggerated your involvement in
| a key project and we figured that out during the interview"
| or "you're fine, but we found someone we liked better".
|
| How do you think honest feedback of "you should stop
| providing misleading descriptions of your work experience in
| your resume" goes over?
| 3oH2y869 wrote:
| Yeah, this happened to me this week. Honestly, I wouldn't worry
| about it. It sucks that they don't want to see more but it could
| be any number of things that they isn't working out for them.
| This experience you have doing the takehome, it's definitely
| going to help you out in the future in your next interview. Just
| think of each interview as another opportunity to learn and grow
| your interviewing skills :)
|
| But really, I think that interviewers should be gracious about
| takehomes. And if they're not, that gives you and indication of
| what kind of place it is to be.
| shakes_mcjunkie wrote:
| Yea using it as a learning opportunity is useful.
| prewett wrote:
| As an example of an effective take-home project, I was applying
| for a contract helping implement features for an open source
| project. Normally I don't like take-home project, but this
| project was interesting, so I was willing to give it a shot. It
| was basically implementing a 20-line function, but in order to
| implement it you had to be good enough at code spelunking to find
| the appropriate place to put the function, and then figure out
| the build system to build and debug the implementation. The
| implementation itself was fairly straightforward, maybe used a
| set or a map or something. When I was finished they talked with
| me about the implementation, and asked how I tested it. After I
| finished I realized that it was an effective interview project
| (even though I was annoyed at having to spend extra time),
| because it was designed to show if I could navigate an unfamiliar
| codebase and build system, which is an important skill,
| especially for an open source project. (I did get the contract,
| and it was definitely an interesting project to work with.)
| SirensOfTitan wrote:
| One company I interviewed with told me to spend no longer than 2
| hours on a project. I complied and followed that time boundary,
| as I wasn't paid for the interview and I didn't feel it was fair
| to me to spend any more time on it than that.
|
| Long story short, the company passed on me, saying that my code
| was easy to understand and high quality, but I didn't handle all
| of the corner cases. I listed most of the corner cases they
| mentioned in the readme as limitations from the time limit. It
| was clear that while they said to limit my time on the project,
| they didn't really mean it. They wanted an exhaustively finished
| product in a ridiculous amount of time.
|
| At this point in my career, I'll just decline interviews that
| don't respect my time.
| jmholla wrote:
| I had a company ask me to put together a performance
| improvement plan involving proposed changes, instrumentation
| and engineering changes. They expected me to look at all their
| existing code, talk with engineering and other employees and
| put together this plan in 6-7 hours, an already ridiculously
| large time frame. I told them that allotted time was way too
| small for what they wanted and withdrew my application. It felt
| like they wanted me to put together a plan they could implement
| without paying or hiring me. Worse, I'd be working around their
| schedules to have these conversations so it wasn't really a
| take home assignment.
|
| I wish I had saved a copy of the assignment. It was ridiculous.
| DethNinja wrote:
| So was the company the best in their field? I sometimes see
| small / badly managed companies pull such interview processes
| and it is ridiculous. You would expect they would hire 100x
| engineers with these tasks but I wonder what they are exactly
| looking for.
| jmholla wrote:
| No. They were just starting out trying to sell their open
| source product. In fact, I had interviewed with a different
| company solving the same problem whose tech I thought was
| way more impressive.
| bernawil wrote:
| I once had a recruiter send me the project template in a .zip
| for the take home with the instructions to take less than 3
| hours (the email wasn't timed to start right away either). No
| server with countdown, no forking from github, just download
| this zip and then email back in less than 3 hours. I thought to
| myself: will they check the download time from the share drive
| (if they even can)? will they just pass me by default for
| starting one day after the email delivery? Open up the zip. You
| need to add 6 endpoints, 2 of those are some fairly complex
| aggregate queries and I had to take a quick refresher on the
| legacy ORM they were using. For the frontend, bootstrap a react
| app from scratch and implement 6 flows (some even required you
| to go beyond the api tasks). They even encourage going above
| and beyond and adding unit testing and some integration tests
| for the UI! So then it was obvious the metagame was cheating
| and you'd be compared against people cheating. Are people
| sending edited git history? doing it in groups? what was the
| catch?
|
| I obviously noped out, but am still wondering if they are aware
| that all the people working there 100% cheated on their take
| homes.
| ncr100 wrote:
| Paid interview FOR THE WIN.
|
| > ... as I wasn't paid for the interview and I didn't feel it
| was fair to me to spend any more time on it than that.
|
| I have been paid for an interview, a coding interview where I
| fixed a bug and added a feature while my pair (future
| colleague!) chilled .. I think he surfed and I'd ask him
| clarifying questions occasionally? Anyhow, I got paid like
| $400. Best interview ever.
| quasarsunnix wrote:
| Had the exact same experience. I actually got the role, but the
| feedback provided asked why I didn't build out something fully
| featured, despite them stressing to me the importance of doing
| it within 4 hours.
|
| The worst part was that after working there I found them to be
| terribly unproductive and it would have likely taken a team
| there a week to build what they were suggesting...
|
| But yeah as you said, either ignore the time constraints if you
| really want the role or just politely decline due to the red
| flag / inconsiderate nature.
| OJFord wrote:
| Yes, I had a very similar experience.
|
| Honestly 2h from scratch is a rush to do anything? However
| simple it is, you're asking for an 'entire' greenfield project,
| of course I have skipped things and missed corner cases.
| 3oH2y869 wrote:
| I'm in FE, and FE interviews can be like this so much. "Here's
| a takehome for something that in reality would take a week to
| complete but do it in an hour and don't spend more time on
| that!"
|
| And I'm like.. an hour is not long enough to implement any
| reasonable webapp... I have no idea if other people went over
| or not, and it almost feels like a test of commitment (if I was
| serious I would take the actual 4 hours it would take and
| pretend I did it in 1 or something like that).
| spacebanana7 wrote:
| Yeah even a basic to do list or calculator web app can take
| several hours if it's your first time with the specified
| framework, build tool or CSS library.
|
| Given the diversity of FE it's quite likely for a take home
| project to hit one of those criteria.
| solardev wrote:
| Totally agreed. After an initial 30 min interview, I then spent
| something like 12 hours working on an atypical (for me) take home
| project. Actually really loved the challenge and learned a lot
| along the way and was excited to discuss it and learn more.
|
| Got a "Thanks, you're not moving on" message and that was it.
| Man, the rejection is totally fine, but I really do wish they
| could've spent a few min just explaining some details. I've
| gotten more thoughtful rejections from just cover letters and
| resumes, not to mention public PRs in strangers' repos.
|
| After spending so much time, it just feels like a betrayal of
| some unspoken developer ethos (vs say talking to a generic HR
| screener). If you're going to make someone code for you for hours
| and then dismiss their work, please at least tell them why in
| just a few sentences. You don't need to comment line by line in a
| code review, just general thoughts like "better code org" or
| "poor architecture and readability" or "better tests would've
| caught this major bug" or whatever.
|
| In my case this was a small company I was super excited to work
| for, and waited more than a year to finally have a chance to
| apply for (once my current job ended). It was definitely
| disheartening and makes it hard to want to try again with them in
| the future.
|
| But, you know, the other side of the coin is that maybe they're
| just getting swamped with so many applications they can't take
| the time to thoughtfully answer each one. I imagine I'm competing
| against a horde of more qualified ex FAANGers right now and maybe
| they're too busy trying to decide between the top 3 or 4 vs the
| long tail of hundreds of us who failed the take home. Who
| knows...
| shakes_mcjunkie wrote:
| > the other side of the coin is that maybe they're just getting
| swamped with so many applications they can't take the time to
| thoughtfully answer each one
|
| Maybe. At the point in the process where you're seeing
| someone's project, you've already spent time probably phone
| screening them, sending them the project, hopefully reviewing
| it. It takes relatively little time to write a quick sentence
| or two in review of the assessment. It would be nice even if
| they _didn 't_ look at the project and just said "sorry, we
| didn't have time to look at your project because we're moving
| forward with other candidates".
| solardev wrote:
| That's fair enough.
|
| Well, it's a good lesson to have gone through though. If I'm
| ever in a situation where I am asked to evaluate others in a
| similar fashion, I'll be sure to leave detailed feedback (if
| they want it), now that I know what it feels like.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| If they're swamped, and they're asking all the ones they're
| swamped with to do a project that takes hours, that's abuse.
|
| Why abuse? Well, let's say they have three solid candidates.
| They ask each to do an assignment. Would I do a 6-hour
| project for a 33% chance at a job? Maybe, especially if I
| really wanted that particular job.
|
| Now let's say they have 30 candidates that they ask. Would I
| do 6 hours of throwaway work for a _3%_ chance at a job? No -
| not knowingly. If I 'm an average candidate, I'm going to
| have to do that 30 times to land a job. That's 180 hours, or
| more than four full-time weeks of throwaway work. That's an
| abusive process.
|
| Could I spend just as much time interviewing? I could, but
| there's a difference. If I'm interviewing with you, you're
| there talking to me. You can't waste my time without wasting
| your own. Whereas with a take-home assignment, you can waste
| my time but waste little or no of your own. As a result,
| interviewers (usually) pay some attention to not doing
| needless interviews, but pay less attention to not asking for
| needless take-home assignments.
| solardev wrote:
| I see your point, that there's a significant information
| and time asymmetry there in favor of the employer.
|
| That said, though, I also think the take-homes are a much
| more _enjoyable_ use of my time than running through
| interview gauntlets with people who don 't even work in the
| same team or in tech at all (recruiters, HR screeners,
| upper level bosses, whatever). At least code presents a
| somewhat objective metric I can be measured against, as
| opposed to random people's opinions about me after talking
| for ten minutes. Those sorts of interviews feel more like
| theater than assessments. I'm good at them, but I don't
| feel like they're a good way to gauge a candidate's
| effectiveness, including my own.
|
| With the best take-home I did (not this 12-hour one I was
| just talking about), we met right afterward to discuss the
| pros and cons of my assignment, what went well, what could
| use more care, etc. It was more of a discussion, like "Why
| did you do X this way" and "Did you consider Y when you
| chose this?", followed by a segue into how the take-home
| relates to the actual products they were building, and a
| high-level discussion about how I'd implement similar
| patterns in a production app. I did end up getting that job
| and loving it. The process never felt exploitative, and the
| team ended up being amazing. I'm still thankful for the
| person who gave me that take-home to prove myself, vs the
| hours of pointless recruiter chats before the assignment.
|
| But yes, they shouldn't be 6-hour take-homes... that's too
| much to ask of an unpaid candidate. A reasonable take-home
| should take 2-3 hours max for a candidate of median skill,
| IMO. As an aside, my 12-hour one was my own fault for not
| having worked on that specific problem enough (web
| animations in SVG or canvas), but I was happy to be
| figuring out a new challenge after my last job got too easy
| and boring.
| labcomputer wrote:
| > It takes relatively little time to write a quick sentence
| or two in review of the assessment
|
| Not just that: At every job where I interviewed candidates,
| HR expects _some_ kind of feedback beyond just "hire"/"no
| hire". _At least_ some bullet points of highs and lows, red
| flags, etc.
|
| If nothing else, this helps protect the company from false
| allegations of illegal discrimination by having documentation
| for why a particular candidate was rejected. It also helps
| recruiters to know if they're finding candidates who are
| "close to what we want" or "not even in the ballpark".
|
| Now, I know that some interviewers can be fairly blunt in
| their feedback, so you'd not necessarily want to just copy-
| paste it to the candidate, but the point is: that feedback
| _already exists._ The recruiter /HR just needs to (maybe)
| sand off some of the rough edges.
| trabant00 wrote:
| Took a "2 hour" take home project after several rounds of
| interviews. Actually took an entire work day. They checked it and
| discussed it with me. Next step was the recruiter telling me they
| are afraid I'm not a good cultural fit. Never again.
|
| Oh, and the project smelled like something they actually needed
| in prod.
| zarathustreal wrote:
| 100%
|
| I recently completed a take home challenge for a full-stack
| engineer role. Given a week and told I could request more time if
| necessary. Instructions specifically said "We're not looking for
| a pretty UI, we prioritize component structure and
| functionality." and "Use any framework you'd like." The challenge
| was to build a back end with four endpoints for CRUD operations
| on a resource representing an application for car insurance. The
| front end was a single form for updating and submitting the
| application.
|
| So naturally I whipped up a solution in less than 24 hours with
| simple pre-built components that both looked great and were
| functional (Mantine UI + Firebase)
|
| I submit the challenge and check the logs every day to see if
| they'd run the application. A week passes before I hear anything
| back from them, logs still showing that the front end was never
| visited, none of the CRUD endpoints ever submitted to. "We
| reviewed your submission, thank you for your time, best of luck
| in your search"
|
| Naturally, I respond confused about the claim to have reviewed my
| submission, wondering how they managed to test the functionality
| without visiting the site or making any submissions. I asked if I
| had misunderstood the challenge, asked if there was any feedback
| about how my submission fell short of their expectations.
|
| "We reviewed your submission based on the code you submitted and
| came to the conclusion not to move forward."
|
| ...yea long story short, I'm never spending time or money on a
| take-home challenge ever again.
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