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Comment by hobofan | Hacker News Reader

> before they ask you to do their multi-hour coding test for no money

Where do all of you keep finding those companies? Is that an SV thing, or am I just not applying to "prestigious" enough companies? I've been on my fair share of interviews and haven't had that happen once, along with no whiteboard interviews. I can echo your experience about Github projects playing a small role apart from signaling though. Once, an interviewer mentioned one of the Github projects I worked on and we exchanged 2-3 sentences about it, but I don't think it had a significant impact on the result of the interview.

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It's pretty much a standard interview practice in Boston.

As a rule, I don't and have never consented to them because I find them exploitative.

They're pretty rampant in Canada. You usually get one of these types:

- Long home coding challenge (for no pay of course) - Hours of whiteboard coding talk. If you're lucky it relates to the job at hand, most of the time it doesn't - Doing coding tests online, either through their propitiatory app or through sites like HackerRank. - A conversation type interview, where you talk about the job (have only had this one in my recent attempt. Didn't get past that phase)

Of the roughly 30 interviews that I've done in the last ten weeks, only one place ever asked about my github profile (which I don't have yet, currently revamping it since most of the code was years old and pretty meh). Almost every one of them had questions about my linkedin profile though.

>>Long home coding challenge (for no pay of course)

There is a way to do this. But some people go a little too far.

Last years one start up asked me to write an entire backend application for them for free.

Sounds like a large retailer that wanted the same for an interview. The job I found out later went to a kid of one of the managers.

That they declared bankruptcy this year has been a tasty bit of schadenfreude.

Just write one that will explode in their face within two or three weeks, and remove that time bomb when they hire you. :)

Can confirm, not a SV thing, plenty of it in Europe.

Nothing to do with prestige, it's a simple "will this monkey jump through hoops" test to see if you'll work in shitty conditions for shitty pay.

My go to response is asking them to look at my git instead, which ends the process in about half the cases. The other half they look at it for <5 minutes and point out the error that isn't an error (yes I know what an SQL injection is, and I've taken steps to make sure it won't be an issue).

If I came onto your project I'd be trying to fix that SQL injection too. Why don't you add a comment explaining why you know it's safe and why you aren't using the standard way of escaping variables in SQL?

That actually didn't occur to me.

I'm not sure where I'd put the comment, since in the part where router paths are set up, it's self-documenting/obvious that it isn't an issue, and if the person skips that and looks at individual functions only, then I'd have to put it in too many places.

I guess I'd put it in the paths, as it's something that needs to be kept in mind while updating the paths. Also in the coding conventions, but it's understandable not to have one on a small project.

Another option is to create a function like _escape_numeric_string that returns its input after asserting the string is numeric and has a comment explaining, and use it everywhere. Although yes, that does mean changing all your individual functions.

Generally if a code reviewer suggests a change it is worth documenting why the change isn't practical. That can be adding a test or adding a comment.

I recently had 3-4 interviews in the same format. Its so frustrating and heart wrenching after rejection. For a job i have to go through 2hrs of coding interview.

I've had to jump through those terrible "online coding challenge" hoops for jobs that didn't even involve coding! Tech companies far and wide are currently obsessed with them, to their detriment.

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