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Comment by koblas | Hacker News Reader

Are people having success with hiring based on problems like this? I've seen it at Dropbox, Facebook, Bump, Quora (and many others). While I agree that it would remove the chaff from the job submission pipeline, does it fill it with enough quality candidates to make it worthwhile? I know in at least one case where I played with a problem that the "easy" solution was not appropriate at large scale and it wasn't worth the time to spend the time researching the problem space for an optimal solution.

Anybody else have experiences either positive or negative on the hiring from (candidate or employer)?

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I did this once when considering applying to ITA. I got bored in the middle of the puzzle and went to work for someone else instead.

(They wanted me to do, "using any language, write an IRC-like client and server". 10 lines of code these days, but still not interesting to do for free.)

I think these are good ideas to get a different view on candidates who love problems like these or see one that they are willing to do the problem set research about, but for this reason, should not be a "requirement" for candidates.

I solved one of their puzzles and mailed them the answer, must be decade ago now. Did not even get an acknowledgement e-mail back.

I work at ITA and review puzzle submissions. I can't say what practices were 10 years ago (before we had our first customer!), but I would be shocked if this happened today or even several years ago when I joined. All of us did a puzzle to get an interview and we respect the time and effort it takes.

ITA probably had their first customer by the time, as it was already prominent and a success story in Lisp community. I must be misremembering the exact year.

Anyway, no biggie. The puzzle was among the simpler ones (solving a maze iirc), and I was mailing out tons of job applications at the time - with low expectations for each individual one.

And presumably instead of hiring you, they hired somebody just as capable but with a higher tolerance for solving boring problems for insufficient pay?

Sounds like a win-win.

I actually had a bit of fun doing a challenge problem for Bump (although I was in school at the time and admittedly had a bit more time to spend).. It felt like a more sensible assessment than a resume or some simple fizzbuzz problem would provide, as well.

I solved a puzzle for ITA. It got me an interview, and made good discussion fodder once I was there.

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