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Comment by saghm | Hacker News Reader

> for one, because they are NOT time-bound

I find this point interesting, as to me, this would be an argument for, not against. Time constraints on homework assignments are a lot closer to the constraints you'd have programming for a job than "whiteboard coding" would be. I'd hazard a guess that doing a good job on an in-depth, open-ended problem given a few days to a week is a better indicator of ability to be a successful software engineer than being able to solve a logic puzzle on a whiteboard in fifteen minutes.

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If the interview time is paid, sure. But if it's not, agreeing to do unbounded unpaid work for a chance of being hired for a paid gig, especially when it's not even clear the chance is particularly strongly correlated to effort put in, gets worse as a proposition the longer you spend on it.

I was speaking more from the side of the company; from the side of the interviewee, it's less clear-cut; if you're the type that doesn't tend to do well in interviews, it might be preferable, but if you don't feel like you'll do a better job on a homework-like problem, then it's definitely worse.

By design. In the candidate pool, there will be some who see the odds as too steep. For others the cost of completing assignments is lower, making the proposition better. Not good, but comparatively better (less bad) than for the former kind. And that's how we know whom to hire.

And the people who have "non-bad" opportunities will, of course, take them instead.

i think it can go either way.

i agree that it seems easier to simulate working conditions with a homework assignment. (it does add a lot of work for the company to do homework problems well, but let's leave that aside)

the downside is that the candidate has a limited amount of time to talk to you. they often have a full-time job going on top of the job hunt. secondly, are you really game to spend 0.5-2 days of unpaid work just for the chance of being invited to interview further?

Also mentioned in sibling comment, but I was thinking more from the perspective of a company trying to accurately gauge a candidate's caliber. From the side of an interviewee, it definitely isn't a clear win; the only case where I think a candidate would prefer this would if they tend not to perform well in interviews (which I don't think is necessarily a good indicator of whether or a not a candidate would perform well for a job).

An additional perspective I didn't think of until now is whether this type of recruitment process would be more beneficial to the industry as a whole. An argument could be made that we'd all be better off as a whole if interviews tended to more accurately assess candidates and candidates were able to get a more realistic sense of the type of work they'd be doing for a company.

Also it doesn't scale for the candidate. If you need 0.5-2 days of unpaid work for _each company_ and you're applying at 20 companies, you're spending more time applying for jobs than you would be working 10-40 hours of unpaid work just to get to the next step.

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