If you don't want to do the take home test, tell the company just that. You aren't going to hurt anyone's feelings. You don't have to be overly polite about it or think of excuses. No one there is going to care.
They will just move on and hire someone else. You can move on and apply somewhere else. That's all.
(and evidenced by "I will also state that they can check out some of the previous code I have written on my GitHub." where the candidate still wants the company to keep considering them after declining the test.)
How do you know that's the goal of the test?
Ask yourself how the company founders and initial employees got their jobs. Almost certainly not by going through their ex post facto, arbitrarily selected in-house hiring process. Was that unethical?
IMO there's actually nothing wrong with hiring the first qualified applicant who shows up, and then calling off the search. Is there an ethical obligation to hire "the best possible candidate", and why? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing
Is it unethical to recruit an outside person you already know is good, and not offer an open position for everyone? It it unethical to go with an internal candidate and not offer an open position for everyone?
Companies tend to waste way too much time, effort, and money on hiring. It's premature optimization, the root of all evil.
Uniformity is not the same as ethics. Otherwise, we'd be ethically obligated to eliminate special parking stalls for the disabled. Moreover, there's nothing inherently ethical about any given company's uniform hiring criteria. Any given set of criteria may "discriminate" in favor of certain traits and against other traits. How do you judge the ethics of the criteria themselves, in comparison to other possible uniform criteria?
For founders this is a perk of being a founder. You are welcome to found your own company if you wish.
> Is it unethical to recruit an outside person you already know is good, and not offer an open position for everyone?
Yes, it can be. Especially in larger organizations that have policies around diversity and equal opportunity, it is in fact a requirement to have a large enough and representative pool of candidates.
Yes, but that didn't answer my question about ethics.
> You are welcome to found your own company if you wish.
I did!
> Especially in larger organizations that have policies around diversity and equal opportunity, it is in fact a requirement to have a large enough and representative pool of candidates.
How often do tech companies get a "representative" pool of candidates?
But this actually goes to the other issue I raised:
> there's nothing inherently ethical about any given company's uniform hiring criteria. Any given set of criteria may "discriminate" in favor of certain traits and against other traits.
In particular, take-home exams that take many hours to complete tend to discriminate against certain kinds of candidates, those who don't have a lot of free time outside of work, family, etc.
It's important to note that these tests are primarily used by tech companies as a screening device, not as the method for making the final hiring decision, which tends to be more subjective. They don't simply add up test scores and choose the highest scorer.
Moreover, the tech industry seems to be obsessed with tests, but they're an outlier. Tons of other industries use more informal methods of hiring and don't give tests at all, much less take-home tests. Do you think they're all unethical?
On the topic of hiring, a "Job Simulation" is one of the most objective measures, which is pretty close to what a practical test is. Questions about things candidates actually did is another important technique (e.g. tell me about a time you ...), and the third category of techniques that work is giving hypothetical situations that they need to explain how they would respond to.
Although informal conversations are common in industry, they are some of the worst techniques. For example, if you start with a "coffee chat" research has shown that most people more or less make up their mind in that first meeting then bias the rest of the interview results to unknowingly justify their decision.
> If you care at all about bias and diversity, you may want to learn more about how to construct interviews that reduce both.
Interviews, whether formal or informal, are a very bad way to evaluate the skills of job candidates. The best predictor of future performance is past performance; research the candidates as much as possible. But in any case, hiring is a crapshoot.
Interviews are useful for getting to know each other, seeing if you want to work with each other, and asking clarificatory questions.
> On the topic of hiring, a "Job Simulation" is one of the most objective measures, which is pretty close to what a practical test is.
Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills. https://news.ncsu.edu/2020/07/tech-job-interviews-anxiety/
https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/employment-tests-and-sele...
"I know that every other candidate for the job successfully did this exercise but I found it too difficult to even set up. Can you hire me over all of them?"
What do you think the company's response will be?
"Every other candidate was desperate and rejected a thousand times so they're happy to waste their time on your pointless exercise that you won't even look at."
The good candidates are busy getting hired by companies that understand how to evaluate their work based on interviews, references, and several other things that don't waste their time.
But there were also reports on HN that before the layoff wave, they'd get 2-3 applications per year for a senior position. It is of course any employers right to continue applying the same hiring standards as eg. FAANG/Big Tech would. But if I were the employer, a better strategy in such a situation would be to just swallow that I can't pick and choose if I have nothing to offer for leverage :)
I'm sure you're smart enough to realize that what I'm hinting at is that the job market is a _market_ and that employees don't have to put up with every bullshit depending on the market conditions.
If you accepted the take-home, and failed to get started on it, and then asked for something else, I wouldn't. Because I have evaluated other candidates and they were able to do it.
I don't do these sorts of tests, personally (I even had one that they expected would take a full 40 hour workweek to complete!). If I'm presented with one, I know that in declining to do it, I am disqualifying myself for the position.
It's just life. We all decide what our limits are, and in deciding those limits, we exclude some possibilities.
They spent longer time than preferred.
And yes, they're looking for a shortcut.
There is no way around fulfilling the task.
Not revealing the time spent poses risk of impostor syndrome, risk of actually landing a very stressful job.
Refusing to solve the task indicates that they would rather post-pone finding out, and rather risk rejection if it means not being challenged on their solving speed disqualifying them, because they think that it too likely would disqualify them.
Personally I prefer a take home over a full day technical whitebording on-site which is my idea of hell. But unfortunately many companies do both in the same loop instead of one or the other
My advice:
Your first step as a candidate when given an assignment (with specific time constraints that you feel are mis-estimated), is to guestimate what you think it will take. Remember, this is exactly what happens at work with task estimation. Are you going to 'politely quit' if your manager gives you a task that can't be done in a certain time window?
"I reviewed the task and my estimate is that this will take a few more hours than specified. I would like clarification if the time limit is an informative hard limit."
One benefit of asking for estimate confirmation (specially for people like me who tend to go for more general solutions) is that you may actually get useful feedback. If you get a firm 'yes' from a competent team then it means they are looking for absolute simplicity in solution, and your weekend project of pimping your take home task is not only a wasted effort, it may actually take you off the list.
Whatever response you get back it will be informative, sometimes even shedding light on what sort of organization you are applying to join.
What? I like sokoloff's response[1]. It takes 3 seconds.
About a month ago I had this happen:
-Explained full interview process during the phase 1 call (15 min call, round table, and lastly a take-home code challenge)
-they were cool with all this
-they get to the end of phase II, after an hour long call with a bunch of people, and passed it/went great
-they then surprised us by refusing phase III/the take home test
As an employer I try to set expectations early, they acknowledged it and then proceeded to get upset when we did what we said we were going to do.
Also, why would you do a round table before a take home? Do you not value the time of your people?
I mean they made it through Phase 2 and sorta 2.5 where we confirm salary and they accepted. Everything seemed on track until the test was mentioned.
If they ghosted us after the round table interview then sure, but why come back and accept a salary just to bail at the last step?
If it were my company, I'd be taking a cold, hard look at that process to be sure that it's OK. Perhaps it's not really going as well as it seems.
I suspect that your messaging during phase 2.5 is bad and you're misleading candidates into thinking that you've decided to hire them, and then when you follow that up with a take home they conclude that you're fucking with them or a disorganized mess.
By doing it at the end, you are just telling the candidate "Oh, you are good. You passed phase I and phase II... but that's not enough you poor candidate!".
Every time I've been presented with a take-home test, it was done this way. I'm genuinely surprised to hear that some companies do this at the end.
Basically, assume that candidates can drop at any time.
Just a guess, but perhaps they're trying to provide some constructive feedback to the company to let them know that the time estimate they're giving to their candidates is potentially way off. (That said, maybe it's not way off for people with more experience, but the candidate doesn't get that.) It's probably futile, but I can understand the urge. If they company doesn't know a problem exists, they can't fix it (if it is an actual problem).