Comment by solardev | Hacker News Reader

Comment by solardev | Hacker News Reader

Totally agreed. After an initial 30 min interview, I then spent something like 12 hours working on an atypical (for me) take home project. Actually really loved the challenge and learned a lot along the way and was excited to discuss it and learn more.

Got a "Thanks, you're not moving on" message and that was it. Man, the rejection is totally fine, but I really do wish they could've spent a few min just explaining some details. I've gotten more thoughtful rejections from just cover letters and resumes, not to mention public PRs in strangers' repos.

After spending so much time, it just feels like a betrayal of some unspoken developer ethos (vs say talking to a generic HR screener). If you're going to make someone code for you for hours and then dismiss their work, please at least tell them why in just a few sentences. You don't need to comment line by line in a code review, just general thoughts like "better code org" or "poor architecture and readability" or "better tests would've caught this major bug" or whatever.

In my case this was a small company I was super excited to work for, and waited more than a year to finally have a chance to apply for (once my current job ended). It was definitely disheartening and makes it hard to want to try again with them in the future.

But, you know, the other side of the coin is that maybe they're just getting swamped with so many applications they can't take the time to thoughtfully answer each one. I imagine I'm competing against a horde of more qualified ex FAANGers right now and maybe they're too busy trying to decide between the top 3 or 4 vs the long tail of hundreds of us who failed the take home. Who knows...

> the other side of the coin is that maybe they're just getting swamped with so many applications they can't take the time to thoughtfully answer each one

Maybe. At the point in the process where you're seeing someone's project, you've already spent time probably phone screening them, sending them the project, hopefully reviewing it. It takes relatively little time to write a quick sentence or two in review of the assessment. It would be nice even if they didn't look at the project and just said "sorry, we didn't have time to look at your project because we're moving forward with other candidates".

That's fair enough.

Well, it's a good lesson to have gone through though. If I'm ever in a situation where I am asked to evaluate others in a similar fashion, I'll be sure to leave detailed feedback (if they want it), now that I know what it feels like.

> It takes relatively little time to write a quick sentence or two in review of the assessment

Not just that: At every job where I interviewed candidates, HR expects some kind of feedback beyond just "hire"/"no hire". At least some bullet points of highs and lows, red flags, etc.

If nothing else, this helps protect the company from false allegations of illegal discrimination by having documentation for why a particular candidate was rejected. It also helps recruiters to know if they're finding candidates who are "close to what we want" or "not even in the ballpark".

Now, I know that some interviewers can be fairly blunt in their feedback, so you'd not necessarily want to just copy-paste it to the candidate, but the point is: that feedback already exists. The recruiter/HR just needs to (maybe) sand off some of the rough edges.

If they're swamped, and they're asking all the ones they're swamped with to do a project that takes hours, that's abuse.

Why abuse? Well, let's say they have three solid candidates. They ask each to do an assignment. Would I do a 6-hour project for a 33% chance at a job? Maybe, especially if I really wanted that particular job.

Now let's say they have 30 candidates that they ask. Would I do 6 hours of throwaway work for a 3% chance at a job? No - not knowingly. If I'm an average candidate, I'm going to have to do that 30 times to land a job. That's 180 hours, or more than four full-time weeks of throwaway work. That's an abusive process.

Could I spend just as much time interviewing? I could, but there's a difference. If I'm interviewing with you, you're there talking to me. You can't waste my time without wasting your own. Whereas with a take-home assignment, you can waste my time but waste little or no of your own. As a result, interviewers (usually) pay some attention to not doing needless interviews, but pay less attention to not asking for needless take-home assignments.

I see your point, that there's a significant information and time asymmetry there in favor of the employer.

That said, though, I also think the take-homes are a much more enjoyable use of my time than running through interview gauntlets with people who don't even work in the same team or in tech at all (recruiters, HR screeners, upper level bosses, whatever). At least code presents a somewhat objective metric I can be measured against, as opposed to random people's opinions about me after talking for ten minutes. Those sorts of interviews feel more like theater than assessments. I'm good at them, but I don't feel like they're a good way to gauge a candidate's effectiveness, including my own.

With the best take-home I did (not this 12-hour one I was just talking about), we met right afterward to discuss the pros and cons of my assignment, what went well, what could use more care, etc. It was more of a discussion, like "Why did you do X this way" and "Did you consider Y when you chose this?", followed by a segue into how the take-home relates to the actual products they were building, and a high-level discussion about how I'd implement similar patterns in a production app. I did end up getting that job and loving it. The process never felt exploitative, and the team ended up being amazing. I'm still thankful for the person who gave me that take-home to prove myself, vs the hours of pointless recruiter chats before the assignment.

But yes, they shouldn't be 6-hour take-homes... that's too much to ask of an unpaid candidate. A reasonable take-home should take 2-3 hours max for a candidate of median skill, IMO. As an aside, my 12-hour one was my own fault for not having worked on that specific problem enough (web animations in SVG or canvas), but I was happy to be figuring out a new challenge after my last job got too easy and boring.

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