Some companies list a take-home assignment as an alternative.
IMO, that's worse than a whiteboard interview. My time is valuable, and I don't want to spend my evenings or weekends on an assignment.
IMO, that's worse than a whiteboard interview. My time is valuable, and I don't want to spend my evenings or weekends on an assignment.
You should provide the candidates with a starter project in their language of choice, already set up and ready for them to start working. And you should give everyone at least some time limit (maybe one or two hours at most) so everyone is on equal footing.
And the worst part is, all the take home assignments I've done are just used as an initial filter, not as a final check in the interview process. I'd have maybe one phone conversation beforehand, spend hours working on the take-home, and then get a short rejection email with no useful feedback.
When I solved the challenge that we give our applicants it took me about 5 seconds to setup the project with everything I needed to solve the challenge. In any language I use it does not take long at all to setup a new project. Especially small ones like that.
My point is your project should be a test of someone's actual development/programming ability, not project setup. You don't want to have people spend an hour configuring CMake or webpack.
For one thing because we don't know every language and every type of project you might use. For instance I don't think we have anyone that could setup a JavaScript SSR app. I certainly have no idea how that works. I am not a JavaScript developer. If you want to solve our challenge that way then you are certainly welcome to do so, but in that case you would need to set it up yourself. If setting up a JavaScript SSR is time consuming or a major hurdle to you then maybe use something else? If we where providing starter projects JavaScript SSR wouldn't be one we would offer anyways.
CMake isn't that much to set up for simple projects if you know CMake.
I personally think it is fair to include project setup in this test, because it will show me how well you understand the tools you use.
The latter are pretty reasonable and IMO both more pleasant to complete and a better indicator of eventual performance than whiteboard interviews.
The former seem to mostly measure the candidate’s level of desperation/willingness to be exploited.
For example, Klaviyo in Boston (no relation, I just interviewed with them at one point) has a take-home assignment listed here [0]. It is simple enough that I can finish it in the same time as phone technical interviews and applies to the company's product and job requirements.
Though I am certain there are companies that have unreasonable take-home assignments.
Curiously enough, some agree
Take home is just you wasting time. Or do you suspect they will spend as many hours evaluating your answers as you took to create them?
I don't think it is wasting time. Even with the very simple challenge we give out we are always surprised at the wide variety of solutions we get. We found it very useful in our hiring process.
Of course that is just us, but when I was on the other side the people evaluating me where asking detailed questions about my solution more often then not. So I assume it is fairly common that the companies actually do also spend a lot of time on each challenge.