Show HN: Coding interviews stress me out, so I built a takehome test tool | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Coding interviews stress me out, so I built a takehome test tool

fairlane.io

15 pointsvorador15 comments

The thing with take homes is that if I apply for 4 or 5 jobs and they all want a take home, than I am literally spending all weekend doing these things because they are NEVER just 1 to 2 hours, it's always more. One time a company wanted me build an entire website, with login, databases, everything, including their obscure stack elements that basically no one knows by heart. It was only supposed to take 2 hours.. like give me a break. I emailed them back saying I expected to be paid for this and almost attached an invoice.

If you aren't a programmer, how do you know you are giving anything appropriate to the candidate, either technically or in a manner that respects our time?

If you were hiring a doctor, would you send them home with a patient? If you were hiring an airplane pilot, would you send them home with a little airplane for a few hours?

Of course not! I can't think of any single profession that has to have such an undue burden placed upon the candidate, so why are we put through this?

Many times, I find myself wishing we could just have a registration or licensing process like other professions. I thought my degree was supposed to be for that, but I guess not.

Yeah that's fair! As a candidate I've enjoyed takehomes in the past because I was able to dip out easily if the project was clearly not doable in the alloted time. It's a bit harder to pull that off in an in-person interview.

Re: the takehomes that never take two hours, I think (but I'm a little biased) that Fairlane solves that – given there's a hard limit on how long the repo is available, a company that makes a takehome that takes way too much time would notice because very few of their candidates would complete it.

Hi HN – I’m Karim, the creator of Fairlane. I built this because as a hiring manager I found out the hard way that take-home projects were way better than any other way to screen candidates.

I know some people here are very against take-home projects but believe me, lots of candidates love them because they remove the stress of having to code live in front of a stranger (me included!).

As a hiring manager, take-homes also let me take more chances on candidates since I didn’t have to convince one of my colleagues to give them a phone screen. The only issue with takehomes is that they’re pretty intensive logistically – there's a lot of emailing back and forth with the candidate to find an appropriate time, following up to ask for the source code, etc.

Please let me know if you have any questions – AMA here and you can also reach out by email at karim@fairlane.io!

Take-home projects are flawed as well.

- The candidates could pay/ask someone else to do the assessment for them/* and prepare a presentation.

- You are assuming candidates are willing to dedicate time to complete your take-home project. If your company is an unknown/smaller/boring company, good candidates won't bother to go through the process.

- Phone screens and or system design white-boarding, etc... only require 45mins - 1 hour from the interviewer to assess a candidate.

All interview techniques are flawed and there is no clear winner. FAANGs, for example, prefer the algo/design interviews and they do have hard data to work with, and clearly that have worked for them.

That said, I think you will succeed. Very simple, straightforward site. Seemingly neat integration with Greenhouse. And clear pricing structure.

Thank you for the kind words!

I think it depends. When I was a hiring manager I offered candidates the choice between takehomes and a regular interview and about 50% took the takehome.

The key to a good takehome was to not be too long and respect the candidates' time – just as it'd be for an in-person interview. I'm not too worried about people cheating, usually they get caught later in the process (e.g during the design interview).

Oh I see, so the take-home project would be the just the first step, not the only? That makes sense. Congrats on the launch, and wish you the best.

Personally, I hate algo interviews and whiteboards and have a 100% fail rate on them. I can do tough Codility challenges, but in front of a person, I fall apart doing even basic questions, and freeze on something like a string to integer conversion. For the tests I've done, normally I ask if I can finish them offline, and I usually get them done pretty well.

It probably takes practice to be good at whiteboarding, but I'd rather practice being good at work than interviewing. So the irony is I actually avoid applying for FAANG, and instead opt for the smaller companies that do this instead.

Some of my best coding interviews have been async take home projects. Plaid actually had a time-limited (2 hr) take home interview where I had access to a github repo with instructions.

Seems like there is a lot of promise here, as Fairlane could help companies like Plaid automate this takehome process in a scalable way for candidates.

That said, I only see this working for very early screens. Do you have plans to support later stages of the interview process?

Thank you! To answer your question about building support for later stages – possibly? I chose to focus on what brought me the most value, screening candidates early in the process. I haven't heard of companies but basing their whole interview process on a takehome because usually they want to get to know the candidate but I'd be happy to change my mind!

So you send candidates a repo invite that they have a few hours to complete a task then the repo gets revoked. Pretty cool!

The only other problem I see is to come up with enough take home problems

Yeah that's a good point! At most of the companies I've worked at we came up with our own coding problem so we just needed the infrastructure to run the takehome. I'll take a note of this and see if it comes up in customer feedback!

This is a brilliant idea and I could see it going well beyond just coding assessments for SWE related jobs. Have you considered selling this into universities where they want to proctor programming exams/labs with integrity in mind? If so I can provide you with some prospective leads that I paid for when building (and failing to sell) a ed-tech product. Cheers!

Hi Connor! Thank you! I haven't considered universities – to be honest I'm focusing on making the interviewing flow as smooth as possible and from what I've heard proctoring tools are pretty intrusive (they want you to install their app, have your camera on at all times, etc.) but I'd be happy to change my mind!

The idea is cool and I prefer take-home assignments definitely as well. Also from an employeer perspective.

I am not sure I am understanding what your tool is doing EXACTLY but the idea is good to have a platform for that :)

Thank you! Basically, it gives you your own private GitHub repo to do the takehome. Once the time is up, you lose access to it and the reviewer is notified that it's ready to review.

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