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Comment by hackinthebochs | Hacker News Reader

Yes, absolutely. I say this every time this homework assignment shit pops up. It's offloading the cost of hiring on to prospective candidates. The asymmetry of cost should give everyone pause. It's plainly exploitative.

So you block off 4-8 hours of your life for this job you're really excited about. What is the employer putting up? Generally nothing. They get a sea of responses and they get to pick a few of the best ones. The 100 responses they got cost these candidates 400 hours of time for no cost to the employer whatsoever.

Take home assignments are fine, but the employer needs to put up something as well. Either pay for the time I spend on it, or have the assignment late in the interviewing process and have employment contingent on passing some known bar ahead of time. That is to say, I should be the only one doing the assignment and there should be no wishy-washy rejections.

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> What is the employer putting up? Generally nothing.

Unless you've been in the shoes of a hiring manager, I'm unsure as to where this idea is coming from?

Having been a hiring manager, it is a horrible experience. Unless it's extremely naive, homework sets generally take time to come up with and formalize, and certainly take time to review the results for.

I suppose I can understand conflating the motivations of an interviewer with their employer, but it's not generally true to say that interviewers are just trying to exploit those they interview.

>homework sets generally take time to come up with and formalize, and certainly take time to review the results for

It's a one-off effort to come up with an assignment. So the cost per application can be extremely low. As far as evaluating them, the bad ones can usually be tossed out in minutes or less. Comparatively, the cost per applicant is basically nothing.

How many companies waive the coding requirement or postpone it towards the end, if you already have open sourced a bunch of code. It is also possible that the HR managers are just happy taking a route, where they can offload most work to the other party. The can instead act as better intermediaries, aligning the hiring goals of the company and the experience for the applicant. Whats wrong with asking them to create better value or understand the domain better so as to be able to create better value?

> if you already have open sourced a bunch of code

How do I know you wrote it and didn't merely paste your name over some project I've never heard of?

Thats quite easy.

1) How many forks and stars do you have? 2) How often have you opensourced? 3) Have you blogged about them or created a documentation? 4) Why did they build each of those repos? 5) Commit logs... etc..

Very easy to develop such a framework.

One or two repos can be copied, but there is ample signature on a genuine open source contributors.

> It's offloading the cost of hiring on to prospective candidates. The asymmetry of cost should give everyone pause. It's plainly exploitative.

There's nothing wrong with that, it's a competitive market, those who get hired are those willing to compete, not those who complain about unfairness about being asked to demonstrate their skills. Employers spend tons of time filtering candidates, even reviewing the submitted work takes time and effort, saying it's no cost to the employer whatsoever is not only untrue, it's naive.

> So you block off 4-8 hours of your life for this job you're really excited about. What is the employer putting up? Generally nothing.

What?! Up until that point, typically, the employer had crafted the job posting, posted in on various channels, reviewed the responses, talked to promising candidates, and then give you the assignment. And a good assignment needs to be carefully crafted, a process that usually takes an order of magnitude time more than what it takes to prepare an answer.

An order of magnitude is not much though, that's only ten applicants? Most assignments waste the time of hundreds of applicants, so it sounds like its still a net win for the employer.

It feels to me like the root problem here isn't how many people are doing the homework problem or whatever. It's that this is increasing your time spent as a candidate relative to the in-person interview.

I think your last paragraph is very close, but I think the thing that matters is "no wishy-washy rejections". Not being the only person taking the test or how much time the company spends seem like ways to make that happen to me.

Maybe I'm just completely wrong here, but I think most of the objections to homework type tests are being caused by processes where the homework test was in addition to the in-person whiteboard interview, not instead of it.

How would you feel about a process that was: some preliminary screening -> nominal 4 hour homework thing -> in person meeting to confirm that you're not a complete asshole and negotiate salary?

Job seeking is a sales activity. You sell your labor on labor market. Every sales activity has a cost. If you do not want to bear this high cost of IT industry, you can work at McDonalds. Probably your sales cost would be much less but your profit also.

What job market do you live in?

It is a sellers market. I get recruited every single day. Any company that disrespects me and wastes my time isn't going to be very successful at convincing me to work there.

Developers are the ones with the power in this market, and I have no problem throwing this power around.

Then go on with your current arrogance. Hope the market continues like this for you.

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