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Comment by lmilcin | Hacker News Reader

I have almost two decades of experience as a software developer, working for a number of big name companies.

First, I will never accept home assignment. There is lots of problems with this even if intentions are good.

I assume this kind of request tells me something about the organization and the manager making the request.

I will ask if it is company policy or local initiative. Sometimes managers just don't know any better.

I would politely explain why I won't comply. I will propose alternative solution which is session over Skype that lets me show how I work while I gather requirements, design, implement and verify the solution

Lastly, I will observe the manager dealing with the unexpected request and grade based on how she deals with it. Remember, they want to got to know you to get better deal, you should do the same.

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I would totally do it if it's obviously not for profit. My previous employer asked me to investigate and try to fix a Firefox bug over the weekend; they had nothing to do with Mozilla, and I claimed no prior experience with Firefox (and had none). It was a test of how I would approach a huge codebase. Ended up being a great employer - I learned a lot there and, be all reasonable standards, I got rich doing it.

Why would you not do a paid take home assignment when it's the way your potential employer is approaching hiring? Or do people ask this unpaid? We do paid two hour assignments, I feel like it just helps people show their style. And it's a helpful preview of where to coach them too.

Because any work delivered in such circumstances has no value (it might be done by your friend for all I know). It creates incentive for candidates to waste time polishing the solution. Most importantly, if you are an employer, think you are probably turning away your best candidates as the only ones that will continue are the ones that are OK with this b*t. Maybe they don't know any better or don't have other concurrent offers to work on or they don't have current job or are not putting effort at the current one. In any case it is likely that they are not your best candidate unless you are best employer in the world that they will do anything to work for. Funny thing, best employers in the world don't ask candidates to do home assignments.

If I am on the market I want to find and chase some number of potential offers. Ideally, I will get all those offers at the same time to pick and choose the best of the pack. This all happens while I have other engagements with my current employer, while I am closing projects, etc. I don't have infinite amount of time. A request like that would drain all my available resources and prevent me from taking part in other processes.

It’s good to have folks like you who stand your ground. However, reality is different and unless the company really wants you specifically and the hiring manager has the political capital to change the hiring process like that, it won’t have much effect unfortunately.

Let's talk realistically. In software development world, if you are able to code your way out of a paper bag and are not living at the literal end of the world you are in high demand.

If you don't have lots of experience you don't want to work for crappy company. If you are experienced you already probably saw a lot of dysfunction and you are more likely to figure out how to work in less than ideal environment.

On the other hand, you don't have experience, you want to learn and it is most likely you are going to learn bad habits working at bad company or for bad manager.

Just stay away. There is enough companies to work for that you don't have to choose from the ones that have warning signs all over them.

Reality depends on the market one is subject to.

But in my own reality, My tangible options were: 1. Pay upfront and study endless hours for a whiteboard interview + hours with phone screening + day spent onsite. 2. On-demand take home challenges (vary from 1-2 days, depending on the company) 3. 1-week payed project with presentation at the end 4. Some cocktail mix of the above

Unless you know the founder, senior managers, or have built rapport with most of the engs of a company, I never been able to push back, not even in markets where the demand was extremely high.

In software development world, if you are able to code your way out of a paper bag and are not living at the literal end of the world you are in high demand.

Only if you don't really care what you work on. A lot of people really want to work at specific companies (like Apple or Google) or in a specific field (like finance or games development). In these cases those companies can place a lot higher demands on their applicants and make them jump through a lot more hoops.

If these hoops actually lead to better quality candidates is of course a different question.

I mean do you by all means, but from a hiring perspective this would be behavior we would evaluate negatively in our process. YMMV of course, and you have the right to these choices.

And that's fine as I would not be interested to work for you anyway. For me the prerequisite is mutual ability to work out differences with my future boss. If we can't agree on a detail so fine as the exact process he uses to learn I can program couple of loops how are we going to deal with really challenging problems?

Why would you turn away a candidate that is able to explain why your process is flawed, stand for what he believes and propose a solution that gives both parties what they want. Do you have such surplus of candidates that you can throw away the ones that have spine with impunity? In your case you want to learn if the candidate is able to code and what best way if he shows how he does it while he does it with you sitting beside. Also explaining the process and showing way more like asking for clarification and verifying results with you?

> Why would you turn away a candidate that is able to explain why your process is flawed, stand for what he believes and propose a solution that gives both parties what they want.

The insecure parse this as a threat to them, if we're being frank.

It also costs them more money, and having you shoulder as much of the burden as possible is part of the short-term-thinkers' goal.

You're kind of cavalierly assuming that everyone agrees with you that the process is flawed. This is definitely a question that reasonable people can disagree about. And if you not only disagree with this hypothetical hiring manager, but you even do it in the fairly arrogant way you're writing now, I wouldn't blame them for passing.

Just to expand a little on why a take-home test could be warranted, I can imagine a few scenarios:

1. You're a Facebook/Amazon/Netflix/Google/Microsoft and you have candidates lined up around the block trying to apply.

2. You're bootstrapped or full on headcount and can afford to take your time and absorb lots of false negatives.

3. You're in a very niche space and know that the few people in the domain are going to be willing to put a ton of work into each and every application. If there were somehow a job that let me play video games and read science fiction while fixing electronics gear on the Moon, of course I'd do a paid take-home assignment for a chance.

Somehow, neither Facebook, nor Amazon, Netflix, Google nor Microsoft give home assignments as a prerequisite for entering into the process.

I can assure you there is no shortage of candidates willing to work for any of them that would take the assignment in a heartbeat.

I can assume the reason they are not giving assignments is what I stated, the hiring process is extremely expensive and it makes absolutely no sense to do stuff that does not give any useful information but may prevent you from ever reaching top candidates that will not let themselves be subjected to this.

The coding assignment has a purpose and the purpose is not to tell if you are world class developer but assure you meeting minimum requirement to be considered for the position. If you give it as home assignment there will be tons of people willing to cheat like getting somebody to do it for you and then explain the solution so that you might pass cursory inspection. Or people who will take inordinate amount of time and spend 50 hours instead of expected 30 minutes you said should be enough.

There is no excuse, the time you spend explaining the assignment and reviewing the results would be better spent setting up a coderpad session (https://coderpad.io/) where you can actually see the person work on the solution and not only the solution itself. Where you can ask questions and have understanding of whether the person is able to solve the problem analytically or writes stuff at random until he finds solution by trial and error.

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