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Comment by jzombie | Hacker News Reader

The next time any recruiter asks me to do a "homework" assignment, I will ask them to write me a 15-page essay explaining how that homework assignment will actually be used, to what extent it will be reviewed, and what criteria it will be judged on.

If the comeback remark is something like, "if you really want this job," I will reply, "if you really want to hire me."

My current job, I told them that I was too busy to do such a thing (and I was), and got hired anyway.

Nobody w/ actual responsibilities in their life should be coerced into doing something for free, for someone they do not know.

Will an attorney give you free legal advice until you decide they are fit to represent you, or will you get free surgery until someone proves they won't completely butcher you? Can you drive a car for free (for 5 - 8 hours) until you decide that's the car you want to buy?

Why is it any different in the software industry? Because we just clack on our keyboards all day and do nothing?

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>Can you drive a car for free (for 5 - 8 hours) until you decide that's the car you want to buy?

This is a perfect analogy.

I went to a Chevy dealer once, asked if I could test drive a car and they wouldn't even let me take it off the lot. I was allowed to trundle around the rows of cars at walking speed with a salesman in the passenger seat.

I went to a Honda dealer, and they let me take a test drive with a chaperone, but only around a short designated loop of streets "for insurance reasons".

I went to a Mazda dealer, and the salesman said he was busy and tossed me the keys and said have fun.

An acquaintance went to a Subaru dealer, and took the car they were considering home overnight.

You a Chevy.

Going further off topic, it amazes me how cagey some dealers can be about test drives. Same as you, I've had some just toss me the keys, without even wanting to see my drivers license, and that makes an infinitely better impression than wanting to come with me or wanting to talk about my needs first. I don't understand why it's not standard.

I think it's more up to the individual dealer than a policy of a given brand

It's sometimes useful if the salesperson can tell you things about features of the car while you're driving, but usually I know more about the car than they do.

I'm sure that some brands/locations have essentially zero risk of theft while for others it's a bigger concern. It's similar to how some places you can just pay in full with a personal check and they are fine with it (even not doing a credit check), while others won't accept that.

Insane. You've got to at least test drive on a highway.

Some years ago, a Nissan dealer offered to let me take a high-end crossover home for the night without any prompting. Ended up buying it. Would buy again from that dealer if I were still in that area.

If it's insured, it's no skin off their nose.

Gestures of goodwill go a long way in sales, that's why people love to pay for coffee or lunch when out with potential customers.

I've bought three cars in my life and never drove any of them before buying. I know it's unusual but they've all been great. I did do a lot of research ahead of time though.

> Will an attorney give you free legal advice until you decide they are fit to represent you

I agree with your point overall, but I do have to say that it is very common for lawyers to give free consultations with potential clients, often offering very useful advice. This is something I've benefited from more than once, actually.

Yes and developers often give free advice in interviews. However attorneys are not writing contracts for free to get jobs.

And in fact, if as an employer all you require is a copy-pasta employee contract, you probably still want to go through a lawyer to have a professional opinion and work. But they on the other hand often just copy-pasta, and write an expensive bill.

"Can you drive a car for free (for 5 - 8 hours) until you decide that's the car you want to buy?" Yes. It's called a test drive. I think the longest I've seen is a free 48 hour test drive with an online e dealership, but free all day test drives are the norm in the UK. Similarly most lawyers will give you a free consultation. I think you have a highly distorted view of reality, how other professions operate, and of your own worth.

>Will an attorney give you free legal advice until you decide they are fit to represent you, or will you get free surgery until someone proves they won't completely butcher you?

These are bad analogies because both have extremely extensive tests that are not only unpaid but the tested pays a small fortune for.

If development had the same no one would be asking you.

>I will reply, "if you really want to hire me."

It’s not about hiring you it’s about trying to prevent hiring the wrong person which is extremely expensive in time and money and takes weeks to figure out.

I understand what you're saying, however, I think that a lot of the criteria used in these homework assignments can instead be worked out via some conversation to judge the depth of knowledge and culture fit.

I've passed tech interview challenges only to fail the culture fit because I thought it would "be so easy" after the tech challenges.

And I've passed culture fits only to fail the homework assignments.

In one circumstance, not realizing that a separate recruiter was sending me to a company I had previously interviewed with, I've also seen previous work that I did in a homework assignment, given to me in a different homework assignment with a "what improvements and features would you add to this solution?," when the original homework assignment was the same task. That was a major blow, and gave me feelings they were using some of that work internally.

I get that it's extremely expensive in time and money to hire the wrong person.

On the other end, it can also be extremely expensive in time and money to not be extremely selective of whom you want to work for.

lmao do I understand correctly that you were given code that by chance you yourself happened to have written and were asked "how can this piece of crap be improved?"

It had work in it that I put in before, but it wasn't entirely all mine, nor did it have all the original work I put in the first time.

> Will an attorney give you free legal advice until you decide they are fit to represent you

All but one new legal engagement I’ve entered into started with a free consultation. (The only one that didn’t was a straightforward real estate transaction where I knew the lawyer for years beforehand.)

I don't pay $200,000 a year for a car. If I were going to then I'd like to test drive it for 5-8 hours. An ideal test drive should help both sides understand what the future relationship will be like. That saves time and disappointment on both sides. You'd like to date someone before you marry them wouldn't you. I would always be happy to pay for a test drive though. If you're not willing to offer a test drive then you'll also probably miss out on some great relationships in your life.

Fair point, though nobody is obligated to pay a year's salary to a candidate that didn't work out.

Have you ever run a business or paid employees from your budget?

Clearly you've never employed someone in the UK/EU.

The proceedings to jettison a bad hire can take 12 months alone, meanwhile they're still a bad hire being paid.

In the UK you can sack someone for being a poor fit without any of that within the first 2 years.

Good luck at the tribunal

Employees in the UK don't have access to an employment tribunal unless they've been at the company for longer than 2 years.

BRB, speaking with HR about some firings.

Thats just wrong, you can have 3 day, 3 week or 3 month probation and fire them immediately if you dont like them.

And if you cant tell whether they are good developer after 3 months, how is an intervoew going to help?

It is entirely normal to have a test period of 1-3 months here (inside the EU, which is not homogenous and doesn't look like the UK at all) where you can be fired immediately.

It isn't a magic bullet. I've had people perform well then tail off and while it may be a failure of my management that I couldn't help them perform better again, it isn't the norm and replacing those people isn't easy.

Rightly so, it should be hard to fire people and should require first showing evidence of trying to work together and help in good faith.

Maybe I'm weird but I kind of like the take-home assignments. I find them pretty fun and not at all stressful like a whiteboard interview. And I've never not gotten an offer this way because I think there's a lot less variance (whiteboard style interviews you might get asked some random BS that you don't figure out).

IME you also often get paid (albeit a relatively small amount) for doing them. And FWIW once they want to hire you many employers will actually spend hours trying to sell you on joining. Usually not in the form of an essay, but doing several hours of sell calls or lunch meetings with different people at the company is not that strange (especially if you are higher level).

You’re not weird, just lucky. I too have gotten my longest job of my career from a successful take home exercise, but I have never been paid for my work and am rapidly reconsidering just how willing I will be to do take home exercises for free in the future.

> Because we just clack on our keyboards all day and do nothing?

No, it is because some people have worked at very impressive jobs and probably just clack on keyboards all day and actually did nothing while there, so when you hire them you learn that they actually can't do the job you hired them for. You just can not rely on the CV alone.

In the hiring process there has to be some kind of skill test. If it is not a "homework" then it has to be a whiteboard/live coding/system design type of interview and there are a ton of problems with this type of skill test as well.

We usually give people the choice which route the candidate would like to do. Take a 1 hour interview or a "homework" assignment which took me about 1 hour to solve. Which is probably best because some people really prefer the homework because they get nervous in interviews.

> Will an attorney give you free legal advice until you decide they are fit to represent you, or will you get free surgery until someone proves they won't completely butcher you?

I do not know how attorneys or surgeons are hired, but my guess is that the education side of these jobs lines up much closer what is actually needed to do the job (which isn't really the case with Computer Science) and that when they claim to have done X or Y then it was actually them in court or at the operation table and not someone else from their team.

Clients select their attorney based on reputation of the attorney or the law firm they work for. For Surgeons it is probably similar. If you have the choice you want to go to the hospital with the best reputation. If the company you apply to already knew your name and reputation beforehand then the skill test is probably also not necessary, but that is not usual in my experience.

It also probably helps that both of those jobs require a Professional License to practice these jobs. Maybe if the software industry introduced a Bar Exam then these "homework" assignments would not be needed anymore.

> Can you drive a car for free (for 5 - 8 hours) until you decide that's the car you want to buy?

Usually you can. At least in my experience. Not fo 5-8 hours of course, but long enough to know.

If you know of a better way to hire people: I would be happy to listen.

An interactive whiteboard / live coding session is by far greater than any homework assignment, in my opinion.

W/ an interactive session, you get instant feedback (either verbally or via emotional cues) into what they are expecting.

With a homework assignment, it's hard to determine which path to optimize for.

If a homework assignment is necessary, it would be better if that were more of a "probationary employment" type scenario, perhaps at a very reduced amount of pay, to only imply that both parties actually have skin in the game.

Even better, for helping me judge if it's a decent fit? Show me some code you're using in production so that I can code review it on the call. Surely it's not all hyper sensitive.

I work on the matching engine of a stock exchange. So it kind of is fairly sensitive, but I get what you mean.

> interactive session, you get instant feedback (either verbally or via emotional cues) into what they are expecting.

For some people, like myself, that is a nightmare scenario. I do not do well in these type of sessions. Which are also not even close to reflecting the real work we do. There are absolutely no meetings I go into that I can't prepare for [1] and there are absolutely no meetings where I have to solve a problem on the spot.

Being on the autism spectrum also means "emotional cues" are pretty lost on me.

There is also the fact that interviews have to be during normal working hours. Some people prefer to do a "homework" assignment which they can do in an evening or weekend.

This is again why we provide the choice. Not everyone is the same and prefers different interview and assessment routes. Both types are useful for different people.

> If a homework assignment is necessary, it would be better if that were more of a "probationary employment" type scenario, perhaps at a very reduced amount of pay, to only imply that both parties actually have skin in the game.

Really? You would refuse a "homework" assignment, but would agree to "probationary employment"? The later just sounds like WAY more work on both sides.

We have discussed something like this in the company I work for, but came to the conclusion that it just is way too much work. Getting the contracts in place and working out the insurance and tax implications and all that. It just is way too much work to do legally, because it would be the same amount of work to just hire them. However: we can't just hire everyone.

Maybe if you are already a freelancer beforehand then we could work something out that way, but in the jurisdiction I am in not every software engineer is ready to accept freelance contracts. It is a simpleish process to do, but not everyone does and those that do don't apply for full time positions.

[1] You can "prepare" for interviews, but more in a scatter shot approach studying all the interview questions that could possibly be asked. That is not what I mean. There is no meeting I am going into where I do not know the precise topic that the meeting is about.

I have been caught off-guard by coding tasks in the middle of an interview that I thought was more geared for casual conversation, and it's not always a comfortable feeling, but sometimes it can prevent either party from wasting a lot of time.

However, I've also been a few hours into a homework assignment thinking that I could probably go down some rabbit-hole to try to perfect something that I may have been struggling with, and sometimes can't determine the appropriate stopping point.

The "probationary employment" would be more like, I don't know, a gift card, or something, vs. something formal.

That way, if I totally bombed out in some assessment, no big deal, here's something for taking the time to apply, and maybe I could use the card to buy a book.

Now, I get that companies aren't giving gift cards away to all of their interviewees, so this type of thing would only come after at least the first round of interviews, etc.

More often than not, a non-interested company will often not even tell why they didn't pass the assessment, and it generally feels like a waste of time.

Yeah, that is what I mean when I say that either way has problems with them.

I had someone try to implement a whole relational database when the interview task was just to read from a CSV file and provide a REST API to the contents of said file using any tech stack. Impressive for sure, but unnecessary time wasted.

> The "probationary employment" would be more like, I don't know, a gift card, or something, vs. something formal.

We discussed something like that in the company. Mainly because someone asked to be paid for the time spent on the "homework" assignment. We came to the conclusion that there is no real legal way for us to do so. We probably spent more money on discussing the possibility of paying the candidate then what 1 day of work would have cost us, but the cost wasn't even the issue.

With an in person interview there was maybe a chance. Inviting the candidate out to the exchange, giving a tour of the trading floor and then paying for transportation, lunch, dinner and hotel would be no problem.

Though interviews are online now as we are a "remote first" company anyways.

We just can't pay for work without a contract, insurance, tax and background checks in place. We can however ask them to complete a test. Which is what the "homework" assignment is.

> More often than not, a non-interested company will often not even tell why they didn't pass the assessment, and it generally feels like a waste of time.

It sucks. It just is that nothing positive can come from providing feedback and you open yourself up for a lawsuit.

The downside to 'probationary period' is that as a candidate you're limited to a single company. If you have to spend a week/month at X, you can't really consider Y, you won't be able to give them the time. Then at the end of the week/month X gives you an offer and you can't even compare it to any other offer, because you didn't have time to get any.

Another thing is, if they let you go after the probationary period, you pretty much start the search anew. If you applied to another company while you were 'employed' by X and you managed to schedule another probationary period with Y right after the end of the trial period with X, you have to refuse them last second in case X wants to hire you. If you didn't search for anything while at X, you're off work for another week/month while you search for another trial.

If X ends up giving you an offer and you want to consider Y, what are you gonna tell them? Please wait a month for me while I work for this other company and see if it's any better than you? This simply doesn't work, for both companies and candidates.

Your proposed solution works, if X is your dream company and you will accept their offer no matter what. That's not how most job searches go though.

Whiteboard coding almost always devolves into leetcode which also requires at home study. You're going to be spending evenings and weekends coding something in either case.

That part is understandable. Perfecting your craft requires many hours of hard work and dedication, and you can never know everything.

For me, I work on a lot of open-source as side projects, so there's always the coding "something" factor.

> In the hiring process there has to be some kind of skill test.

No there doesn’t. There isn’t one for the CEO is there?

How many CEOs have you interviewed to run your company? How did you conduct the interview? Do you think that same interview is appropriate for a developer?

The fact of the matter is that without the skill test there are way too many people that are incompetent and you have to have some way to filter those out.

I do not know how it works with CEO positions, but I am not hiring CEOs. I do hire software engineers and would like to work with competent people.

If you know of a better way then I would like to hear it.

Then fire those people. It's an easy solution.

It's extremely intensive to onboard a new employee; and extremely disruptive to onboard a new employee and then immediately fire them. It's also very demotivating to the existing team.

I would say it's a lot more disruptive to leave someone incompetent on the team and let everyone else make up their work instead of building a solid team.

IDK, schools do it all the time.

We would like to know who is competent before we hire them. The point is that we do these types of tests so that we don't hire them in the first place.

We can't hire everybody. I can't hire 20 people (then fire 19 of them) for the 1 position in the 8 Person team I want to fill. That can't work.

Just hiring someone and then firing them 2 weeks later is expensive as fuck. We can't just do that until we find someone actually competent.

Your "easy solution" is only easy if you don't think about it at all.

You're just hiring people who care to do these types of tests or are good at them, they don't mean they will be good at the job.

I'm not saying you don't do ANYTHING to hire someone. Obviously there needs to be some judgement of skill. But take home projects where you're judged essentially against how much time you put into them (I've personally had projects where they asked me to build an entire web app, it's insane) because ... it's a race to the top in a way here, if you spend more time it's going to look good, because the best projects are from people that spend a lot of time on them...

It's just ridiculous. You end up doing 8-16 or more hours of work for a job you likely won't get (it's free for you to ask me to do this test, so you ask everyone to do it).

It's not expensive to hire and fire someone. Not that expensive. It's probably worth 20hrs of 100 candidate's time, that's for sure. If you don't think so, I have a bad opinion of you.

I'd like to ask you, how many candidates a year do you have turning in take home projects?

> You're just hiring people who care to do these types of tests or are good at them, they don't mean they will be good at the job.

We align the Take home assignment very close with what the position actually entails. If you struggle with this assignment you would not succeed with actual tasks we do daily.

> Obviously there needs to be some judgement of skill. But take home projects where you're judged essentially against how much time you put into them

As I said elsewhere as well: People are free to choose to do a Technical Interview instead. If you fear that you would need 2 whole days you could take the 1 hour interview instead.

> if you spend more time it's going to look good, because the best projects are from people that spend a lot of time on them...

That is not my experience. There are people that just can't make it look good.

> It's not expensive to hire and fire someone. Not that expensive.

It absolutely is. Maybe not where you are, but where we are it is expensive. For one there is a big amount of paperwork involved, contracts, NDA's and background checks. We can't do this unless we know we actually really want to hire you.

I also can't expect a new employee to be productive right away. There is going to be a onboarding period of at least 3 months during which the employee probably needs a little bit more mentoring of a (more) senior engineer. If we would just hire 20 people for every position that we need to fill we would not do anything else then just onboard new people. So, YES, it is significantly more then 20h of 100 candidates time. Not to mention that the take home we give out takes maybe at a maximum 4h (if the candidate is fairly junior and has to look up stuff constantly, many people just do it in 1h).

Also: I think it would be HIGHLY unfair for the people to just hire 20 candidates if you only plan to keep 1. They probably quit their jobs or said no to other opportunities. We only hire people we see a long term future at the company.

> I'd like to ask you, how many candidates a year do you have turning in take home projects?

It is fairly late in our hiring process and it takes a significant amount of time from at least 2 senior engineers each time to review. I don't have the exact numbers how many times per Year, but we try to keep it very low and only if there is an actual interest on our side.

> People are free to choose to do a Technical Interview instead.

Ah, I missed this, and I'm sorry. My experience has not been this over 100+ technical interviews over the last 10yrs.

Almost all of them have asked for crazy take-home projects. I'm pretty bitter about the fucked process.

I've tried to push my employer(s) to offer the dual paths. Like you I prefer the HW-style process (and think they are a truer judgement) but I understand why some don't like it. I wish more companies would support either path.

> it is because some people have worked at very impressive jobs... they actually can't do the job

> In the hiring process there has to be some kind of skill test

Thats a contradiction:

1 - 90% of companies do skill tests

2 - you cannot trust the CV of a candidate even if the company they worked on previously also did a skill test

3 - you think your skill test will enable you to hire the right candidate

So everyone is doing tests and everyone is hiring shit candidates anyway?

That's literally proof that these tests are worthless.

Maybe if the recruiters actually knew what they need from a candidate, companies were clearer about what the job involves, they would stop hiring the wrong people for the wrong job.

There are some studies that claim a large percentage of people (40%+) lie on their CVs. As someone who hasn't done that and struggles to lie even in games, I have a hard time believing it. But even if 5-10% of people lie, hiring is a lemon market, and you definitely don't want to get stuck with the lemons.

Most lying is apparently to change start and end dates of previous employment to cover up short stints where they may have been fired for poor performance, but even if work samples/skill tests/structured interviews were 95% effective, you would still regularly hire duds.

I believe it. Even with the take home assignment people lie and cheat.

We had one person who literally hired a team in India to do it for him. Presumably planning to give his work to them later if he was hired.

How could you possibly have found out about this?

You sound so jaded, I don't blame you, but I hope you're not ever my hiring manager.

We asked him some questions about the code when he came in for the last interview and contract signatures. He didn't have a single clue about any of what he supposedly wrote. When we talked further he admitted to using a Team in India that has been working for him for a while.

Needless to say we didn't proceed with signing the contract.

1 - I don’t know the hiring standards of every company and that 90% sounds made up to be honest.

2 - We can not trust the CV. Maybe the company did a test, maybe they didn’t. Maybe their test are to our standard, maybe they aren’t. Maybe the candidate barely passed. Maybe the candidate actually failed but made up in other ways that might be relevant to the other company, but not ours. I doubt anyone would give us this information about their current or former employees. Maybe the candidate really did work on the projects he claimed or maybe he was only tangentially involved. That is a lot of unknowns. A test clears up what the person actually can do.

3- Yes. It works for us. Do we miss out on some good candidates because of this? Yes, but it definitely prevented us from hiring bad candidates.

Again: if there is a better way then I would like to know. I have not found one yet.

The better way is to treat people's time as important as you treat your own and your resources at your company.

There is a large company based in NYC that interviews thousands of developers a year, but only hires a few hundred. Each of those devs do a take home project that takes about 16 hours to complete. The project requires nothing to ask, so this company asks everyone. 30,000 hours is a lot of time - it's about 3.5 years of someone's life - and at least this time is spent each year by this company (and they pay nothing for it), not counting the rest of the interview process, because it is cheap for them to do this.

And we wonder by productivity is down :)

Respect people's time. If it is hard, figure it out. That is your job if you want to hire people and feel good about it.

Because take-home exercises are both the best way to evaluate a candidate (I have never gotten a nasty "surprise" while hiring in companies that did take-home exercises: I mean it, absolute 0% "bad hire" rate, the only bad hire I got was a candidate that was allowed to skip the take home exercise) and they allow you to find absolute jewels amongst the candidate pool who are great, reliable engineers but regularly bomb regular interviews.

While there are people who are naturally great at interviewing in person or who don't mind grinding leetcode for free for months on end, there is a whole "base of the iceberg" population who a) can't spend months grinding leetcode on end but they can definitely spare a couple of afternoons for one job they are interviewing for – these are normal people with normal jobs and a normal family who don't interview every month just for kicks, they do this a couple of times every 2-3 years, and, b) just cannot code while under stress. You may scoff at b) if you've never experienced it, and while I found it really hard to understand for a while as I also have no issues with getting into deep focus while people are looking and/or trying to talk to me and there's a time limit, it is absolutely real.

Unfortunately, there is an extremely vocal minority (you) who go absolutely ballistic when asked to do a take-home exercise, who absolutely ruin it for everyone else and make hiring managers shit their pants whenever take-home exercises are suggested. I honestly don't understand why there's such an outrage, take-home exercises are the minority already, because there's a strange huge backlash.

Sure, if you're a great communicator (usually native English speaker) and grind leetcode for fun so you can shove 5 interviews in one week, you hate take-home exercises. And that's fine, really, just please apply to the leetcode grinding contests and stop poisoning the well for the rest of us who would like to cater to the large amount of extremely competent engineers that don't fit that persona.

> Nobody w/ actual responsibilities in their life should be coerced into doing something for free, for someone they do not know.

I take it you haven't interviewed for a SE in a while? The status quo requires you to perform months of unpaid labor, not days, just in the form of memorizing the solutions to every single Leetcode Hard problem. How is that better?

> I take it you haven't interviewed for a SE in a while? The status quo requires you to perform months of unpaid labor, not days, just in the form of memorizing the solutions to every single Leetcode Hard problem. How is that better?

I guess because it kinds "scales". Once you are familiar with Leetcode you can use this skill to take interviews with different companies. Take-home exercises dont' "scale".

That being said, I believe people are against take-home exercises exactly for the reason you support it: it's usable code. They worry the companies will exploit candidates by using their code for free. Leetcode is "useless" so it's safe.

I've never had a take home assignment that was "usable code" - they've all been toy problems.

For clarity, these take-home exercises that I'm referring to are completely toy problems. They're usually one or two REST APIs on top of a toy data structure (sometimes in-memory, without a DB at all), just to see how the candidate models, writes and tests code. An API that does some pricing math based on some in-memory state or the likes of it.

If we're talking about "make me a website" kind of exercises that one could throw into production after some tweaks, then that is free labor and I would absolutely refuse those.

Also, the fact that "leetcode scales" is part of the problem I was talking about. I really dislike the fact that if you train for months to develop a complete set of skills parallel and irrelevant to your actual role you can now efficiently interview for a number of companies that pay top dollar. So not only people with actual skills and experience are on equal (or worse!) footing than someone straight out of college, it also incentivises those who mastered leetcode to interview everywhere, since "it's all the same", while normal people who are good at their job get their torn to shreds after one or two interviews. So not only it's judging the wrong thing at the interview, but it's also causing a starvation situation for the candidates that are not playing that game.

Why are we creating incentives to people becoming "professional interviewers"? This would be like Google encouraging SEO spam instead of fighting against it!

I agree with all what you said. I'm just speculating on why some people prefer leetcode over take-home exercises.

That's certainly your prerogative, and we all have to draw the line somewhere in terms of interviewer demands. Personally a reasonable homework assignment (like 2-3 hours tops) is less annoying than multiple 6+ hour interview panels stretched out over a period of months, which is also very common. At the end of the day though, the company decides the hoops you have to jump through if you want the job, and you can either take it or leave it. FAANGs can get away with onerous processes because of the technical brand and outsized comp, but startups and lesser known companies who try this are shooting themselves in the foot.

In my experience you still have a 3-4 interview loop on too of your take home project.

While I do agree with your general point your analogies are bad because yes, you can test drive a car, yes attorneys often have a first free session with potential clients.

That being said the come back makes perfect sense to me. When I was still on the IC track and interviewing, when I was submitted to some "dumb" questions I would ask the same kind to the interviewer. So you just asked me to write this stupid algorithm? How about you whiteboard something for me now?

It was almost always met with dead silence to which I would say "well you're trying to figure out if I'm good, I want to do the same and make sure your team has good engineers".

Of course it never went anywhere since, while they had 55 minutes to grill me I was only given the last 5 for my questions.

    Will an attorney give you free legal advice until you
    decide they are fit to represent you, or will you get
    free surgery until someone proves they won't completely
    butcher you?

There's a big difference between both of these industries and the software business - if you show up claiming to be a lawyer or a doctor and are bullshitting, you're in a LOT of trouble.

If you do that in software, you're probably just back on the job market...

> I will ask them to write me a 15-page essay

I have my own list of questions. If they answer all of them I have a pretty good idea if I'm the guy for the job. The most wonderful part is figuring out if it is an employer is looking for initiative or obedience. If you are running a sheep farm it can be very exciting to see initiative.

Agree, lately I’ve been telling people I’m too busy interviewing, they try to force it then call me back in a week and let me skip

i got a really good job off of a homework assignment so this is a hard disagree for me. of course mileage might wary

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