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Comment by jackfrodo | Hacker News Reader

All things being equal, if I had to choose between applying to two jobs, and one of them explicitly offered the salary that I believe I'm worth, then yeah, I would apply to that one.

On another note, one thing I've been thinking of doing, (and I'd be delighted if you did it!) is a job board that only shows positions with take home interviews instead of in-person coding exercises. I think this is a growing trend as people realize that they're missing out on good developers who suck at coding under pressure with someone looking over their shoulder. I've come across several threads on HN with people saying the same thing.

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The take-home system is great if you actually use it. I won a prize in a programming comp from a well known hedge fund - lots of interesting (and frankly hard) problems and I learned a lot. The competition was essentially take home and submit a bunch of numerical answers. Several questions were pinched from Project Euler, but I won't hold that against them... Small cash prize and offer of an interview for an internship. I assumed that they would take into consideration the submitted code, perhaps discuss some of the solutions.

So what do they ask in the phone interview? "How would you reverse a linked list?". Yeah, no. They didn't even bother to call back after I'd bombed it. It struck me as a bit weird that they went to the effort of coming up with a competition and then chucked the winners through the usual loop.

Genuine question, but what is so difficult about reversing a linked list? I don't have the algorithm memorized, but i can deduce in 10 minutes at most.

It's not, at all, but it took me by surprise and I made a mess of it. In hindsight the answer was less than 10 lines of python. The next time I went round an interview loop I rote learned all the CS101 stuff, because that's what you have to do (I'm not a computer scientist).

The issue was that the comp contained a lot of stuff that you couldn't deduce in 10 minutes. For example, all-shortest-paths graph search, performing huge calculations (e.g. stuff that blows up extremely fast), monte carlo simulations and other bits and pieces. It would have made for a much more interesting interview.

Not everyone can come up with an answer under a pressure situation when put on the spot. I've managed it in an interview but it was quite stressful.

I had a very similar experience. The interview guy most likely first saw my resume a minute before the interview. Clearly did not see the code I wrote for them.

Just to expand on this, maybe a job board should tell you what the interview process is like. Whether its take home test, whiteboard, in person project, etc.

Yes, and this being a field that you can filter by.

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