Comment by notus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by notus | Hacker News Reader

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I was not a fan of Zapier's interview process. You're actually timed on your project and you have exactly 2 hours to do it. I was ultimately turned down after doing it because they said there were linting errors and they said I was using hooks incorrectly. My usage of react hooks was straight from the documentation and I showed my solution to several other people in the industry and they saw no issue with it. I was under the impression the purpose of those coding assignments is to deliver something imperfect but functioning and talk about how to improve it.

The main problem I see with a lot of remote companies is that they seem to be overloaded with applications to the point they are making strange decisions about how to filter applicants. They also almost always require you to do some type of project which is a big commitment if you're applying to a lot of places. My best application experience apart from the one that hired me was Duck Duck Go. They pay you to do the project and I feel that is a far better approach. That way they don't have to feel bad about turning you down because hey you get paid, and you don't feel so bad about not getting it because hey you got paid.

I ultimately got a much better position at a fully remote company than I would have gotten at Zapier so it wasn't a matter of me overestimating my worth either.

I also found that a lot of the well known fully remote companies take forever to respond to you, gitlab, zapier, and DDG were the most responsive and communicative during the process, but I have some that I applied to 2 months ago that are just now emailing me to set up video screens. Startup companies tend to be the most responsive, I would get video screen invites sometimes within minutes after sending an email out.

Generally speaking all companies that gave users such tests have been quite mediocre imo. Code is only a part of a developer’s work.

I think most companies I've worked at opportunistically looked for standout candidates by always having job postings even when there were no openings. This creates a feedback loop.

Yeah definitely a possibility. In this case they told me it was to fill a position on a specific team, but they could have just been saying that.

Would a 2-hour time-boxed interview feel better? Not @ zapier but thinking about optimizing remote interviews.

My main gripe was with the hard 2 hour requirement and the immediate dismissal of it based on what I felt were either trivial or inaccurate concerns. Additionally if you created a PR for the project any point past the 2 hour mark you were not considered anymore. Having a project is fine, but if the applicant takes the time to do the project and it's at least 80% of the way there I think interviewers are doing themselves a disservice by dismissing projects that are not perfect. There is no way to accurately determine whether that person is a good fit or not based on that little information. You might find that they spent more time planning for example and wrote something that would scale better if more time was spent on it. IMO people who plan more than they code are better assets.

In essence, if you require a project to be done for an interview regardless of the time limits and the applicant makes a reasonable effort and demonstrates adequate competency then IMO you should always give them an interview. If you're looking for something perfect then pay them. If you put hard time requirements on the project and expect it to be flawless you give off the impression that people are required to work under pressure.

That being said, I think it might be worth considering giving people the option of a take home project or a long interview. I know one guy who refuses to do take home projects and rather just sit in an interview all day and other friends who are the exact opposite.

Salesforce wanted a THREE hour assignment before even discussing the role. What a joke!

I don’t know about Salesforce specifically, but this type of thing is surprisingly common.

If your first interaction with candidates, even from a huge, huge open pipeline of applications, is an automatic request for a time-intensive project or skills assessment, something is very broken with that hiring process.

You simply have to pay the (high & difficult) cost of evaluating & filtering applications and then having a detailed conversation with the small number of applicants you choose to move forward with. You need to understand their technical interests and match to the role, and let them ask lots of questions to even know if they are interested enough to invest time in the rest of the interviewing.

Personally one major change I’ve instituted over a few years in the ML & data science pipeline at my company is that we only do a technical conversational interview, no shared screen coding or take home project at all, it just doesn’t tell you anything, and counterintuitively you end up wasting more time and money administering it than if you just bring people onsite sooner and bite the bullet to evaluate them in a full interview day.

I said f that and still continued my assignment 5 hours later. When they asked me about it I told them the truth, my family came home and I Had to stop. But before I did I left documentation, tests to show my goal, and accepted failure but I personally wanted to solve the problem. Instant hire, even though the interviewers of that round sounded angry that I didn’t finish per the instructions

That’s super rare. Most places won’t even look at your submission at all if it’s one minute past the timed deadline.

I remember doing a timed interview once when I was literally dealing with a harrowing elder care / home hospice ordeal with an aging parent in the next room from where I was coding the interview.

I remember thinking how myopic and un-human that company was (I had explained a little of the situation, they seemed super uncomfortable to hear any more about it, and basically said I could do their timed 2-hour thing like everyone else, take it or leave it).

No room to be a human with a sick parent I guess, or kids or a whole variety of other personal circumstances that make devoting hours of personal time to a coding task a sincerely unrealistic request.

It’s really hard to know who’s telling the truth on both sides. When I’m an interviewer I find this to be a big red flag. Some folks are addicted to a struggle and have an excuse for everything. I don’t mean to diminish your situation but I see it as a bad apple ruined the opportunity for you. People, including interviewers, tend to be creatures of habit.

Why would a company be worried about whether someone is telling the truth about an elder care (or any other) personal situation that renders onerous take-home or timed assignments inappropriate?

If you’re trying to evaluate whether the candidate is telling the truth something is very wrong. There is no reasonable reaction from a company except to say, “you know what, people do have unusual and difficult personal circumstances, and it’s unreasonable to create interview filters you can only successfully devote time to passing when there are no other ‘real life’ issues going on, since this unfairly biases us against otherwise good candidates and makes us come off like we don’t offer pragmatic and realistic understanding of the human condition” and then just stop having take-home / timed coding assessments period.

It has nothing at all to do with that one candidate who alerted you to this. Who cares if they are lying? The point is it’s possible they are not, and overwhelmingly certain that the issue affects other applicants with these kinds of circumstances.

one of the benefits of my current job is they waved the test, so they saved me three+ hours out of my life even before hiring me. They are also paying me quite a bit of money for the market I'm in. I have explicitly said to recruiters that I won't consider moving for less than 16% increase in wage (I mean I named an amount that represents a 16% increase)

A company is moving on me with that increase and I'm starting to think screw it, I don't want to go through the irritating test they will give me. Of course that's because I have a job but still if one is comfortable, why go through the hassle.

To me most of this is basically a sign that more companies who are hiring should try to shift to remote asap, because of the talent pool you get. Also, taking 2 months on a reply to schedule an interview is crazy.

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