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Comment by famil | Hacker News Reader

#2 and #5 are issues with the company/hiring manager.

#1, #4 and #7 are issues with traditional interview as well.

#4 It's incredibly difficult to accurately assess potential during an interview.

#1 and #7: This holds true for white-board interviewing. Most successful candidates (including myself) invested time to practice coding interview questions. I did over 150 questions on LeetCode and it dramatically increased my interview skills. But I guess the upside is that these skills are transferable across companies who do algo/ds interviews so my prep time isn't "wasted".

I think #3 is the only thing thats inherently an issue with the project/assignment interview.

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#1 -- Not as true about whiteboard interviews. Homework interviews generally come in addition to in person interviews, so it's a bigger commitment.

#2 -- yes, this is about the hiring manager. But as the candidate, you don't really know what's going on. So it really is specific to the homework interviews.

#3 -- This is a really, really big deal. You're trying to assess people based on homework... that might actually have been done by their buddy.

#4 -- Less true about coding/algorithm interviews. These are focused more on intelligence/problem solving, which is getting more at potential.

#5 -- Absolutely this is about the hiring manager. But it's also very difficult for a homework project to focus on one things (like problem solving skills). The cheating + lack of discussion makes this hard.

#7 -- Time spent makes a MUCH bigger difference for projects than for whiteboard interviews. A 1 hour project vs 20 hours will look very different. A bad candidate with 200 hours of prep will still be worse than a good candidate with 0 prep.

#2 is not a trend we want to start in industry. With phone screens, both sides make an investment. With a pre-screened assignment, there is very little cost to the company. This gives them a much stronger incentive to throw everything on the wall and see what sticks. Or even feel that they're doing candidates a favor by 'letting' them take the 4hr assignment. Doing a phone screen aligns incentives.

You think you hate whiteboard interviews? Imagine having to to 15+ different take home assignments for different companies before you even get a chance to talk to a person.

I agree, it's bad for candidates but companies might like it. If everyone gives out take home assignments, it would be harder for candidates to negotiate by lining up multiple offers.

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