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Comment by swish_bob | Hacker News Reader

I once completed the task sent to me by a prospective employer, and then thanked them and said I wouldn't be submitting it, as it told me enough about the way they worked to know I wouldn't enjoy it.

Never forget that the interview process is two way ...

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Those few big companies probably have more than enough candidates. If you have too many candidates you need to adjust interview difficulty to still hire only as much as you need. I don't think these companies care that the task is too difficult for 99% of people, or that there are smart people who are not motivated enough to complete it as long as they can get as many smart and motivated people as they want.

That said, finding a job in IT if you are good at what you're doing is a dreamland currently, so declining if you think you won't enjoy working for a given company seems only natural.

Given dynamics above I think you're likely better off not working for one of those top few companies if you don't care about prestige and long term job stability.

Then again, what the heck kind of use do they have for developers that can't push back on unrealistic demands? None, unless they're in the business of missing deadlines.

Simply put, no.

If you have "too many people" you dont make the quality of your hiring "better" by making the process worse.

Being more selective about who you hire is not related to making a stupid test.

You're assuming that most recruiting pipelines are reasonable.

Or it'll just scare away perfectly qualified people with reasonable expectations about the job because the interview process was absurd.

Never assume that a company with a bad interview process has more candidates than they can handle.

A company like that is probably wondering why they can't find the people they're looking for.

This particular company was neither "big" nor one of the "top" companies to work for. I strongly suspect they were getting noddy developers and were happy with them. The reason I didn't want to work for them was categorically not because the test was too hard, it was a trivial spring-boot app. I didn't want to work for them because of what it, and the test process, said about them ...

I have never heard the term “noddy” but assume it is a cognate for “nodding off”? That would make sense in context but I wonder if you mean something else by it?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noddy_(character)

To save anyone else from reading all the irrelevant parts:

> Noddy being associated with small children's reading has led to "Noddy" being sometimes used as an adjective meaning "petty or trivial" (compare with "Mickey Mouse"), for example, in computer programming: "This simultaneous linear equation subroutine crashes out on the Noddy case when n = 1, but otherwise it works." or "Remember to check all the Noddy cases."

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