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Comment by MattGaiser | Hacker News Reader

HN people seem to line up 20 interviews and spend a week doing them. Take homes are untenable in that situation as half the interviews would still be a full workweek. I soured heavily on take homes during an active job search phase as I was already interviewing 4 hours a day with 3-6 people. I had a pile of companies, would accept any of them on the surface, and it was just a matter of grabbing one.

Many interview at a much less aggressive pace than that and I would prefer a take home when I am out of leetcode practice.

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> HN people seem to line up 20 interviews and spend a week doing them.

Having mentored a lot of college grads and also interviewed a lot of candidates, it's actually extremely rare for people to line up a huge number of interviews in a single week. It can be done if you really, really treat it as a numbers game, but it's not how most people do it.

> Take homes are untenable in that situation as half the interviews would still be a full workweek

Take homes shouldn't be taking a full workweek.

If anything, take-homes make it easier to stack a lot of interviews because you can do them at your leisure in your own time.

> I was already interviewing 4 hours a day with 3-6 people

I think this is the disconnect: You're taking time off of work for live interviews, but take-homes come out of "extra" time. If you're interviewing full time, a take-home is still more flexible than a live interview.

Oh, take homes are fine without the interviewing numbers game. They just break when you do that.

Many of the take homes I encountered also had rapid turnarounds. I would have 48 hours from Tuesday afternoon. A couple of times I was up at 3 in the morning as I had two of them due and had to abandon one of them as I just couldn't stay awake longer.

In hindsight, I should have realized the folly of that earlier, but I was eager to get as many paths going as possible.

My favorite (and only) take home interview assignment. >> here is the problem, research as much as you want however you want, and take as long as you want... when you are done please format it as a 'xyz-ide' project on github and we'll get back to you in a day.

I hate this and find this just as academic and problematic as the whiteboard and quiz styles. Success in software development is about making the right trade offs to deliver while saving cost (ie your time). When you leave it so open an abstract, the dev looses the ability to discern this. "Production" standards are entirely based on context of the project and very specific requirements. Do you need structure logging, or rate limiting, or error handling, or notifications, or system status ect.. With do you already have systems in place to integrate these. Do you need a custom solution (like your own lambda engine) or do the off the shelve solutions (like aws lambda) meet the requirements.

Here's the thing: take home assignments typically come near the beginning of an interview process, even before one progresses to an on-site (or equivalent). Understandably, very few companies give a take home in place of the entire on-site. But, a take home generally doesn't get you out of any part of the 4-6 hour dog and pony show. Which would you rather do: 30 minute recruiter chat + 60 minute technical phone screen with a human + 4-6 hour on-site, or the same process with a "1 hour" take home that actually ends up taking 4 hours in place of the technical phone screen?

Incidentally, I have the same criticism of TripleByte. Sure, they get you on-site with companies faster, but their process takes a significant number of hours (essentially equivalent to its own on-site), and it doesn't get you out of any part of the prospective employer's on-site.

This too. I have been ghosted on way too many take home assignments.

Same here. I did a take home that took 6 hours. Sent it in and then a few minutes later received a rejection. I'll never do that again. I now reject any take homes that will take more than 90 minutes. That's by my estimation - not the company's - I've seen many companies way underestimate the time it should take which is a sign that they've never had their own employees try it.

Take homes are bad because the time investment is asymmetrical. A company can just say to everyone who applies to do the take home test because there's really no investment on their part. At least with an interview, you know the company is investing an equal amount of time into the process.

Triplebyte used to be helpful because it did allow you to skip the initial phone screen but that doesn't seem to be the case much anymore.

> Having mentored a lot of college grads and also interviewed a lot of candidates, it's actually extremely rare for people to line up a huge number of interviews in a single week. It can be done if you really, really treat it as a numbers game, but it's not how most people do it.

What people need to remember is that there's a very real pecking order. Everyone will do Google's take-home but the local business paying local CoL/Prevailing wages? By the time some get to their take home, the A players are already landing in SFO for their final rounds.

The people that are the most hirable won't have time to do 20 interviews, they'll get offers almost right away.

> I think this is the disconnect: You're taking time off of work for live interviews, but take-homes come out of "extra" time. If you're interviewing full time, a take-home is still more flexible than a live interview.

The thing is, with a live interview it's one hour of their time for one hour of mine. With a take-home, it could be 4 hours of mine and... ten minute for them to look at the code and run a test suite on it. So as a rule of thumb, I always suggest favoring live interviews (they are investing more time therefore they place a higher value on the potential hire).

> HN people seem to line up 20 interviews and spend a week doing them.

Somehow they also seem to get all their offers around the same time to leverage them against each other.

Well, this is a function of lining up so many. Apply for 50, get interviews at 30, you end up with maybe 1 in 3 have aligning timelines, pass 1 in 3 of those, and you have 3 offers to choose from at the same time before they explode.

Lol. Offers don't really explode on timelines less than a few weeks. If you get pressure from a company to accept their offer in less than a week or 2, that's a red flag, especially if they want you to start right now.

Ah, interesting. I admit that I am often a schmuck that takes contracts at face value. I have always had it be 24-72 hours. I have even been asked if I would accept an offer immediately (without knowing the salary range or whether I would get permanent remote).

> HN people seem to line up 20 interviews and spend a week doing them

source?

The last time I did more than 2 interviews during a job search was 1999.

I assume you are typically hired through network?

Actually, the opposite. Always cold.

Edit: Oops, sorry, that's not true. 2002 was network. Everything since has been cold.

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