(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.)
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.
"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?
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.
"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.
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...
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