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Comment by hackinthebochs | Hacker News Reader

We really need to stop pushing this HW assignment nonsense. It's offloading the cost of hiring on to prospective candidates. The asymmetry of cost makes it 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, I should be the only one doing the assignment and there should be no wishy-washy rejections.

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To add on to this, a take-home assignment should be more than just another filter. The companies I interviewed for with take-home assignments didn't actually discuss the assignments at all in the in-person interview - I spent the time to prepare for and do the assignment, at least pretend it matters.

That just seems odd. How were they checking that you were the one who completed them?

All of the interview processes I've had recently have checked I did the exercise by either asking me to describe what I built with no aid, asking me to walk through the code with it in front of me, or asking me to conceptually expand on what I built on a whiteboard.

They gave me the standard whiteboard interviews on-site after that. This was for a data scientist position. I did not get offered the job (but I accepted a good job offer a couple of weeks later, so whatever).

What if a company offered to pay you a day's wages, or something reasonable still (if it's less than that)?

Whittle down the pool even further and the ones you think look good on paper, and after an interview (or a series of them), have them come in, on a paid basis.

It'd be a sign of good faith that they're both serious about finding a good candidate, and respectful of your time?

I know some companies do paid stuff like that. If only it were more commonplace.

That's the only sensible way to do HW, if it takes more than 5 minutes.

Note that 5-minute-long task is a good pre-filter on its own.

That sounds like a fair process. Employers are in a position of power and can easily abuse it. When the employer also invests in me as a candidate it shows they're serious about me and also ethical. Sounds like a win-win.

> What if a company offered to pay you a day's wages, or something reasonable still (if it's less than that)?

I did an assignment like that for a company once, I'm still waiting for the money for more than one year...

I still wouldn't if I currently had a job. By the time I get home my brain is usually pretty fried and that 4 hours probably means giving up a couple of nights.

It's a bit frustrating because different people react so strongly in both directions. I don't like live coding, but I'll be ecstatic with a pair programming session -- because I can evaluate them at the same time. Homework, I'm generally OK with, but I honestly hate it when you get a response like "We didn't like your code. Goodbye." On the other hand, I know some people who can't deal with the stress of writing code in an unfamiliar situation.

I wonder if the best thing to do is to simply offer the candidate a choice.

> It's offloading the cost of hiring on to prospective candidates.

Why is that a bad thing? The prospective candidates aren't entitled to anything, the burden should be on them to prove they have any capabilities for the job.

> What is the employer putting up? Generally nothing.

Totally incorrect, have you ever had to hire somebody? The initial phone screens alone to weed out the 99% of complete incompetents takes many hours/days. Even getting to the list of phone screens, involves many hours of sifting through resumes, where each resume is cleverly designed to hide the fact that the prospective candidate is incompetent.

Its a bad thing, because good employees are hard to find. They'll go elsewhere instead of jumping through your hoops.

This reeks of entitlement. If you want the job, you'll find four hours. They don't owe you a job and they don't owe you anything for going through their hiring process that they have designed to find people to pay a salary.

I echo the grandparent's sentiments, myself, from my own personal experience as well.

So its entitlement to expect an employer to not exploit their position of power? Sure, I'll take that label.

>If you want the job, you'll find four hours.

But what happens when everyone starts having these 4 hour screens? Now its a 40 hour process to apply for 10 jobs in a week (and this is before any commitment on the part of the employer). It's not sustainable or fair. And yet, there's no incentive for employers not to do it. So we as job seekers just need to suck it up and be thankful for the opportunity, right?

And what's wrong with having a position of power? You say it like it's a dirty phrase.

Can you, personally, pay me a salary? If you can and I want to work with you, I absolutely think it's fair to ask four hours of my own time to demonstrate I'm worth consideration for it. If not, then why does your opinion matter?

You sound like a Libertarian. I'm assuming all the advances in worker's rights we've had over the last hundred years are also "entitlement"? If not, then I don't see what's different about expecting an employer to not exploit prospective applicants by offloading most of the cost to them.

I work at a small company in a remote part of an openly backward state when it comes to startups, and yet got two hundreds applicants to file a javascrip developer position.

After interviewing 10 (say two three hours spent on each between contacting, scheduling up etc) it was clear every unemployed with 'can use word' as skill boosted their resume and applied.

I'm sorry for the real developers looking for a job but a company can't dump 20 days work on chasing and weeding liers.

I'm not a fan of homeworks myself but this is what it has come to.

I'd be payng but that puts the company and the prospect in a very difficult position them towards tax laws and towards their current employer non competes, the company toward again tax laws and then there's the absurd of paying for contract work delivered that's 99% of times not up to spec.

Beside, the unwillingness to compromise smells itself and given the choice I'd never get a potential troublemaker in that only thinks time=money and screw everything else.

That little empathy for both sided of the problems sure is a red flag.

Edit: well unless it's a contracting job then it's fine.

This seems like something a 5 minute FizzBuzz-esque programming assignment as a pre-filter could easily fix. The goal seems to be a barrier that only serious applicants will even bother to attempt, and that's fair. But when that barrier then becomes a 4+ hour time sink for the serious applicants it becomes a problem. There are plenty of hackerrank style sites where someone can show a bare minimum of competency without costing either side much time.

yeah I think 4 hours is a bit too much, in the end you only need competency as a screening.

we used to give out this http://play.elevatorsaga.com/#challenge=3 and asking for solution to level 3 which can be done in a short time + is the first non trivial challenge.

of course solutions can be find in internet etc, but it's pretty easy to look them up if they smell fishy and it'd all come down crashing at the face-to-face anyway

it's also a very good exercise in real world problem solving and a source of endless technical discussion since there's no single good approach, especially with two elevators to schedule.

What power do you think they're exploiting?

Most of the places I've been at were desperate for 'good' people and they couldn't seem to find them. It's still a seller's market out there.

It's the power to get 30+ people to jump through hoops that only one person has a chance at being chosen. Even worse, a good 50-60% of those people have no chance out of the gate, they just don't know it. Encouraging people with little to no shot at the job to do significant work so make your job of filtering them out easier just reeks of exploitation. Come up with a filter that's minimal cost for those applying, fizzbuzz style problems seem suitable.

In my experience most of the places that tried to pull the "no good people" card were also the places that refused to pay even 20% above the market.

If this were true people would be poached a lot more frequently than what we can observe now.

This phrasing may sound like entitlement, but try turning it around. Most of the people who will turn down a homework assignment are the ones who can afford to do so, because they already have a good job or know they can find one. Is that really the first filter you want on your candidate pipeline?

I have never seen a job posting I was sufficiently interested in to put in 4 hours with no investment from the company.

I have, and it's how I got the job I have now, which is by far the best job I've had.

Regardless, if you have a good job already, why apply to any position you're not particularly interested in and that you wouldn't spend four hours trying to get?

Because they contacted me and offered me to participate in the recruitment process, and while I don't look for a job, I'm not against checking where this can take us?

I think it is worth seeing what's out there even if you're happy. Maybe there's something better!

The standard process where the first two steps are some ordering of a 1-hour interview with someone technical and a chat with a recruiter is perfect for this. With minimal effort (maybe 90 minutes) you find out whether they're interested in you at all, and get to ask both a technical person and a recruiter about the job.

The big time investment typically comes later, and I can easily bail if I decide it isn't going to be a compelling offer. I've done this quite a bit.

I'm glad the homework process worked for you, but my point that it doesn't seem like a good idea for the company stands. If the first thing you do is filter based on how badly applicants need a job, you're losing a significant portion of the best people right off the bat.

I've never taken a job I've applied to myself. That is, they were the ones who approached me (some more directly than others[1])

Why would I spend any of my already very limited time if they didn't make sure the process is streamlined?

Also, I don't think it's uncommon to like what a company does and being interested without yet knowing if you're interested enough to put the time aside - most company sites and job descriptions are much too generic and vague, so I'd want to talk to some employees first (remember, interviews are two way conversations). So I might not know if I'm interested enough at the time of application, just that I might be.

[1] for my current job, the interview process was essentially them trying to persuade me to join them, and my previous job I was actively looking for a job and someone I know at the company said I should apply. My "application" consisted of telling him "ok set up an interview"

I want this job or three others.

So now I'm doing a day and a half of unpaid work for them, taken out of evenings and time with the family.

Not hypothetical. I just described my last job hunt, 16 months ago.

The place I really wanted to go closed the req on me, and then opened it back up the day after I started at another place. My third choice (stars didn't align on the other 2 interviews, in part because of stuff like this).

I don't "want the job" per se, I'm interested, which is a bit different and we'll need the interview process to find out if I actually want the job.

Furthermore, I already have a job, just as most reasonable candidates do - so if you want to convince me that I should spend many hours on that, you'd better be sure that your offer has a really attractive first impression and seems likely to be better than the job I currently have, otherwise you'll be self-selecting your candidates only from the (generally less skilled) sub-population of workers for whom "If you want the job, you'll find four hours" is true because they actually are desperate for jobs, unlike most skilled people in tech industry.

And if they want good candidates then they better not treat me like my time is unimportant. I don't owe them my time.

It goes both ways.

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