Hacker News Reader

If you're not willing to pay me on the order of $100/hr to do your homework, I'm not willing to play your recruitment game.

My time is valuable and if an employer isn't willing to give equal effort in the interview process, I'm not interested. Also I'm not particularly interested in a workplace – especially a startup – that insists on this in a recruitment process. It leads to only hiring employees who are willing to play the game which is much more likely to exclude people who want to live lives outside of their job and fosters a culture of obsessive overwork as well as not having the diversity of opinion/demeanor/background/etc. which is valuable in a healthy workplace.

If you want to bring me in and spend a day with me talking and working in your office, fine. I won't, however, spend 4-10 hours working on a problem for you while working at the job I already have and doing the rest of life.

And so playing the game of spending weeks studying CS problems and doing leetcode.com is somehow better?

Senior candidates may have already ingrained this experience, so you will lose out on senior candidates if you require take-home assignments.

Senior candidates are in the worst position for the typical algorithm/data structures interview. College is a distant memory and they need the weeks of study more than fresh graduates.

Exactly. As a 15+ year vet, I love coding homeworks because:

1) I've been coding forever, and have faced code reviews in multiple professional environments. So your "6-8 hours" will probably only take me less than two, and my code will probably look better than yours to a reviewer.

2) I get tired of having to re-read "Cracking the Code Interview", because almost none of that is frequently used outside of academia. And dealing with smug 5-year journeymen interviewers, who are accustomed to asking 1-year juniors to traverse binary search trees and name all of the design patterns that they've memorized from books.

No matter what process your company uses, there will always be people trash-talking it on the Internet. "I refuse to interview at those places", "I insist on being paid an hourly rate to deal with them", etc. I'm sure that 99% of this is chest-thumping bullshit. But regardless, if you're going to filter out part of the candidate pool no matter which path you take... I'd much rather filter those 25-year olds who feel too entitled to write some code, and legitimately believe that companies should just glance at their GitHub page and then hurl them a giant sack of money.

The thing is, the companies giving homework assignments still go through the regular onsite interview process. So it really is just an added burden of stress and time on the candidates. Arguably studying CS problems also helps job performance, though probably not as much as it could.

That's not always true. The best interview experiences I've had were at companies where you were given a homework assignment, and then invited on-site to talk about your solution for that assignment. That's not at all comparable to the standard Apple/Google/Microsoft/Facebook process where you're expected to come in and solve some graph theory or dynamic programming problems on a whiteboard for 4-6 hours.

I would much rather do a homework assignment and then come in and have a code review or design discussion about my solution than do the standard process. And, I would argue that it gives the company a much better look at my skills and aptitudes than the whiteboard interview. I have never once written a dynamic programming algorithm from scratch, in 11 years of programming. I have implemented graph theory algorithms only a handful of times. But create a relatively basic piece of functionality, and then justify my solution in code review? I do that literally every day, and sometimes more than once per day.

I understand that writing code for a homework assignment can be seen as giving the company I'm interviewing for "free labor". But, as others have pointed out, from the interviewee's perspective, there's not a huge distinction between spending 8 hours cramming Introduction to Algorithms and Cracking the Coding Interview versus spending 8 hours making a website using Django or Ruby on Rails (to name two interview tasks that I've actually been presented with). Frankly, I was much happier writing the websites, as it seemed much less pointless than memorizing how to write Floyd-Warshall all-pairs shortest path in Java on a whiteboard.

How entitled. Nobody owes you anything for your desire for them to pay you a salary.

That works both ways, it's not them paying you a salary, it's an exchange of salary for your time and skills.

A willingness to give away your time for free is an indication you don't value yourself that highly.

The difference is that you, as an applicant, want to be part of something someone else created and to use it to feed and clothe yourself.

Nobody is asking for free work. And I definitely would never hire someone that calls a four hour exercise that is part of an application process "an indication you don't value yourself highly." In fact, it would be a huge red flag and I'd throw that applicant'a resume into the trash can.

And they, as an employer, want you to trade some of your irreplaceable time on earth for some money and the chance to "be part of something".

If you can't see the symmetry in the situation it says something about your values, but it is not a compelling argument.

Homework is an investment, with some delay and some risk to it.

Lots of good vendors offer free trials or guarantees without it harming their reputation. In fact most customers object to shouldering all the risk.

I can understand wanting payment.

Wanting the employer to spend "equal effort" is silly. Their loss is not necessarily your gain.

| fosters a culture of obsessive overwork

Ironically, one of the things outside interests can teach you about is something called overtraining, where you can actually get worse at doing something from doing it more or harder.

If you've heard cross-training in a fitness context, it's named that because it's intended to be an antidote for overtraining. Branching out makes you more resilient. Your ability to solve problems isn't helped by hyperfocussing on an extremely narrow context.

Any inventor can tell you that the really big stuff comes from fusing ideas from seemingly unrelated disciplines. And yet we bury our heads because we don't know any better, and we don't know better because we've buried our heads.

> Perhaps my perspective is a bit colored, as I'm far enough along in my career that I can be choosy about which companies I invest time in. I only talk with a dozen or fewer companies in each job search, and so I won't do a 4-hour homework assignment unless I'm already interested in working for you.

Interesting. I've found the opposite. The farther I get in my career (and the older I get--not going to say the "A" word), the more difficult it is to get through the interview gauntlet. Companies looking to fill Junior "5th engineer from the left" roles tend to be fine with a warm body and a brain. Companies looking for super-senior-staff engineers, engineering managers or even more senior folks are extremely picky and probably reject almost everyone they meet. Even when I'm not actively looking for work, I try to answer every recruiter E-mail try to reach out to 1-2 companies a week just to keep irons hot and be able to act on the off chance that something spectacular pops up.

The older you get the MORE shoe rubber you need to go through pounding pavement.

> As imperfect as ALL technical recruiting styles may be, at least a short coding assignment (i.e. < 4 hrs) is halfway-related to the real world.

Yes, but what it is not is economical. There's a huge dropoff in the interview funnel at this step because it's largely not worth the effort for the interviewee. The choice is between spending 5-10 hours per take home test per company or spending 5-10 hours a week studying silly whiteboard exercises that apply to dozens of companies.

It's also just as uneconomical for the interviewer. I've completed about a dozen of these tests over the last year and only one company bothered to look at the test after I sent it in. Which makes sense; it takes time to look at a lot of code, figure out which of it is boilerplate and which of it was written fresh for the test. And even then, there's no guarantee somebody else didn't write it. And while you may not be interviewing with hundreds of companies, most companies easily get hundreds of applicants per position these days.

For whatever reason, it doesn't seem to be worth anybody's time to do these tests. This bums me out because I'm terrible at live coding tests. But, this is the reality of the situation, so I have to adapt.

The way I see it a lot of the best people would probably never bother going through a take home test. A company with a simpler, quicker interview process would have already snatched them up.

There is no simpler quicker process, the current popular process is spending weeks studying CS and leetcode.com. That's a lot worse in many ways.

Sure, there is. Have you seen this approach? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfyWvJdsDRI

Marginal cost to get some sort of commitment/investment out of a company is lower, though. With 4-8 hour coding assignments, that's ~10 companies per two-week period to consider you for the on-site portion. With all the other process stuff, you'd wind up maybe being able to get 1 or 2 concurrent job offers.

All of the take-home interview questions I've done have been given after a phone screen has already been done. I would think that's the only way to do it - it's going to take some time for a company to look over what you submitted as well. I don't think I'd bother doing one without that.

FWIW, I've done a total of 1 for each of the last 2 job searches I've been on, and ended up getting an offer out of each one, so it seems perfectly worthwhile to me to do them.

Weird.

All the take home tests have been given before I had any phone screen with any engineer. The point is to save both your time.

It's worthless if you have the test after already wasting an afternoon on the phone.

If a candidate isn't willing to spend 4-5 hours to try to get the job, I don't want to give it to them.

So you don't want the folks who can walk out of Apple's machine learning department on Friday and into Google's on Monday?

I think there are two main problems with software development recruiting:

1) Companies who are not Google or Apple like to read books about Google and Apple, pretend that they are Google or Apple, and imitate recruiting processes that come from Google or Apple. Which doesn't serve them very well, because they are NOT Google or Apple.

2) Candidates who are not "the folks who can walk out of Apple's machine learning department on Friday and into Google's on Monday" like to pretend that they are, congregate on Internet forums with other candidates who also pretend that they are, and exchange interview advice geared toward people who are. Which doesn't serve them very well, because they are NOT.

> Companies who are not Google or Apple like to read books about Google and Apple, pretend that they are Google or Apple, and imitate recruiting processes that come from Google or Apple. Which doesn't serve them very well, because they are NOT Google or Apple.

A million times this. I got rejected from a company because the interviewer decided he didn't like that I used array concatenation to find the correct solution to a problem he gave me. This was for a job at a 100 person company. Companies writing line of business software need to stop acting like they are google.

> Outside of the interview context, I haven't balanced a red-black tree since I was in undergrad over 15 years ago.

Which company asked you to balance a red-black tree in an interview context? Name-and-shame them. Seriously. I've heard many whiteboard interview polemicists use this example, but have never seen any evidence for it actually happening.

In the programmingzen blog, Antonio Cangiano, a ruby programmer and author of several ruby books, there is a post about an interview for a job at IBM in which the question is to explain how the red-black tree algorithm works.

Hey, I googled for it, here it is: http://programmingzen.com/things-ive-learned-from-hiring-int...

Your comment:

> the question is to explain how the red-black tree algorithm works.

From your link:

> Sample questions included: What’s a Red-Black Tree and what would you use it for?

I don't see how those are equivalent.

I also don't see how the latter two questions are equivalent to asking an interviewee to "balance a red-black tree".

what's to prevent someone from outsourcing the "homework" to programmers on the internet ? I interviewed someone on skype 2 weeks ago and the applicant clearly had someone off-camera in the room feeding them answers. People like money, and they will go great and nefarious lengths to obtain it.

Wow this is really disturbing. I imagine this is why a final round of in-person technical interviews are considered necessary.