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Comment by keraf | Hacker News Reader

Off-Topic but Ghost's recruitment process was an instant turn off for me. As much as I love the project and would have liked to work on it, I couldn't commit to spend 5 to 10 hours on a coding task without even talking to a human first [0]. I understand resources might be tight in small companies, but the prospect of having someone tell me "oh sorry, we already filled the role" after 10 hours of code was not something I wanted to get into.

On-Topic: Congrats for the new major release, always exciting to see what the team delivers!

[0] https://careers.ghost.org/product-engineer-node-js/en#block-...

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I'm definitely sensitive to the unpaid labor thing, but idk how many hours I have spent working on cover letters and my resume anyway, trying desperately to get noticed, only to have no response at all, or just get filtered out in the first step. I have talked to maybe 4 humans total in my couple of years of trying to get a coding job! This makes me excited more than anything, to have something right out of the gate to test my skills on, to be slightly more assured that my work will actually be looked at before I get filtered out... That is absolutely enticing and huge to me, but I get that I am maybe more desperate than most.

Even after the 10h on code or cover letter there is no assurance your submission will be viewed by human. It's easier to filter out code submission than CV/CL. IME the code-first process is even less odds of humans

Do a good project, put it on a public repo. Point them at it. That will help. Or OS contribs perhaps. Good luck!

Haha thank you, I knew I was doing something wrong!

You're being sarky? Maybe it's too obvious advice, especially my emphasis on a 'good' project but I've seen some pretty pathetic ones inc. someone here who complained no-one was impressed with his work. I looked at his github and it was crap and bulked up with 100s of megs of quite pointless (and uncompressed!) textual test data.

Maybe mine's a poor suggestion but I really do wish you the best, it's hard being in that position.

No no, I apologize, I didn't mean it like that at all. I thought you were being a tad snarky, implying that my efforts haven't succeeded because I haven't made something good yet. But I didn't take it in a bad way at all, we are all trying to make good things, and only sometimes succeeding :).

I coded and made things for a long time before I ever even considered getting a job doing it. So, for me it's always a little bit of a struggle trying to find the right "portfolio" project to attempt to spruce up and point to; but I experiment with showing off different things. But that is why the prompted project here is refreshing to me.

I don't know if I code better than that person, but I am very careful about what goes into version control.

Thank you for your well wishes, one day it will work out for me!

Thank you in turn, I hope you find something soon!

This isn't bad advice, I don't know why you people are downvoting it into oblivion.

If there is a coding challenge to advance in pursuit of an open position, and it is not paid, and it will take a significant amount of time (e.g. the 10 hours discussed here) then your choices are:

1.) decide yeah, nah, fuck that job and don't do it

2.) do it, but post it to your git[hub | lab | whatever] as open source, and refer them (and possibly, others in the future) to it

3.) whatever else you would do here, it's not as good as the above two ideas

I went for a job, was given a vague programming task. I spent days on it and was rejected. When I asked why they told me it wasn't what they wanted. I asked what was. What they told me approximately (and that was pretty unfocussed) I was stunned, there was no way I could have got that. Partly a lack of domain knowledge (but the level of expertise expected wasn't stated, apparently telepathy should have been used or something) but mainly the spec was so utterly vague you could not IMO deduce anything useful from it. I resolved if I was ever given such a non-spec coding task ever again, I'd drop it immediately. I'd recommend to others do do the same.

tl;dr if they don't give you a reasonably clear spec, walk away.

Edit: the situation is very asymmetric. They can well afford to waste your time, where you is any number of candidates that apply. There's no comeback on them for being wankers. Another example, I applied for a job, told them I could do it even though I didn't have language X, but I sure knew Y. They asked me to prove I knew Y so I wrote a very detailed breakdown showing I had immense knowledge, maybe more than he had. He dismissed 12 hours work with 4 words "you don't have X". Draw your own conclusions.

Agreed. I think it’s appropriate to walk away from medium-interest opportunities over this because there are too many out there to consider.

With a high interest opportunity it’s less likely to come up, because those are worth the time to strategically target with custom projects, which works pretty well in my experience.

I don’t mind tech screening or leet code challenges at the right times, but an oversized amount right off the bat seems too inefficient, a ham handed way to connect with good candidates.

Wow ok that is a lot for any company to ask you. I technically couldn't do that as I'm not allowed to have a second job whilst working for my current company.

That coding challenge is nuts!

It's not a job though - you're not paid for it. Your employer can't prevent you from solving leetcode challenges either.

You should actually click on the link I will quote from it:

> A paid trial project of about 20 hours work, where we work with you on a real piece of engineering at Ghost.

I could do it for free but paid is a question mark. As long as they didn't find out I'd be fine lol.

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