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Comment by llamataboot | Hacker News Reader

I greatly prefer take-homes, because I feel they show off the quality of what I can do under actual coding conditions (rather than the stress of live coding or the BS of whiteboard coding) but it does get a bit tiresome. Especially because it is rarely a 2 hour assignment, they can be 8-16 easy.

Recently I've had three or four interviews that didn't quite get to the job offer stage, but they did both include over 30 hours of work + interview steps. I'm sorry, but a full week's of unpaid work that I have to fit around my actual day job is just not practical, I know you want to make a good decision, but really...????

The best I've seen recently is a company that paid an hourly wage for 2 days worth of take-homes. Not consulting wages, but a good wage. It gives them incentives not to invite everyone in the world to do their test, and gives the interviewee something for their time.

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> Recently I've had three or four interviews that didn't quite get to the job offer stage, but they did both include over 30 hours of work + interview steps.

This lines up exactly with my experience. 3-4 interviews, each requiring ~30 hours of technical tests, and interviewing. Absolutely ridiculous.

I wish there was like one long interview process I could go through - I do a bunch of technical work, I answer some standard questions on video, a bunch of companies review it all, and the ones that are interested schedule a 1-2 hour personal conversation to make sure we are a good fit.

I suppose that is what triple-byte is trying to do.

But really, we're all at-will employment, let's just work together for 3 months or so, see if you like my skills and I like your culture and if not just part ways - I'd even be happy to work at a wage cut for the first 3 months. But having a full-time job interviewing while working a full-time job is exhausting, esp when after 30+ (!!!) hours of interviews and conversations, you can be cut at the final stage without a single word about what went wrong.

Regardless of what Triplebyte is trying to do, they don’t actually work the way you suggest. You take a short, multiple choice quiz, then do a coding challenge and an interview. I believe the time investment is around 4 hours.

What you get is actual, real feedback on your performance, and you skip straight to onsites with companies they match you with. The feedback is valuable, but I don’t know how their matching process works at all.

What it _doesn’t_ do is “turn an O(n) process into an O(1) process,” as their FAQ suggests. All it saves you is 1 phone screen per company they match you with. If a typical phone screen is 45-60 minutes, and the time you spend on their process is 4 hours, you need to interview with 4-6 of their clients to make it worthwhile in terms of time savings.

IMO, don’t try Triplebyte to save yourself time. Do it for the interview feedback, because that’s the best place I know where you can get real feedback for free.

Ture, but for some companies the "technical phone screen" is multiple interviews + a take home. Etc.

If I get to skip 10+ hours of interviews and coding work, that's a significant time savings

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