Comment by bernawil | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bernawil | Hacker News Reader

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I once had a recruiter send me the project template in a .zip for the take home with the instructions to take less than 3 hours (the email wasn't timed to start right away either). No server with countdown, no forking from github, just download this zip and then email back in less than 3 hours. I thought to myself: will they check the download time from the share drive (if they even can)? will they just pass me by default for starting one day after the email delivery? Open up the zip. You need to add 6 endpoints, 2 of those are some fairly complex aggregate queries and I had to take a quick refresher on the legacy ORM they were using. For the frontend, bootstrap a react app from scratch and implement 6 flows (some even required you to go beyond the api tasks). They even encourage going above and beyond and adding unit testing and some integration tests for the UI! So then it was obvious the metagame was cheating and you'd be compared against people cheating. Are people sending edited git history? doing it in groups? what was the catch?

I obviously noped out, but am still wondering if they are aware that all the people working there 100% cheated on their take homes.

I always do exactly one commit with a commit time of exactly when they sent me the take home. If I actually had to fork something I would create the Github account specifically for just that take home and fork it right before pushing. Creation and modification date of files are the same.

Either they don't care or they see it and figure I must be some sort of whiz. I say that because the amount of people that don't know how git works or that file attributes are arbitrarily changeable is amazing.

And no not specifically to "cheat". Just on principle. If they require BS I give them BS. Else it's just fun. Sometimes the people actually hiring/doing the interview are also not the ones that care for this but HR/senior leadership only.

  always do exactly one commit with a commit time of exactly when they sent me the take home

  If they require BS I give them BS

So, that's editing git history to fit a narrative. I'm not judging though! I guess it really depends how bad you want the job after all. But personally I wouldn't even agree to a process like this that ensures cheating is the only way to be competitive. No company that does this is paying nearly enough to make up for the possible reputational damage, and not counting the hazzle.

What do you mean editing? I only commit at the end. I happen to set the date and time explicitly :) For all anyone knows my timezone was still off from traveling when I committed.

And yes, lots of companies have an interview process that state these things. The process makers are not the same people as are interviewing/going to be your team. I know from the other side where I have in the past internally had to advocate for proper take home practices. They really wanted to extend the take home and to say "should take 4-8 hours" (meaning really it's 2 days of work) . I told them that's BS and I wouldn't be with them right now if that was the practice back when I interviewed.

The worst thing that can happen is that they think you are cheating and they never even call you back. Bullet dodged. The best thing that can happen is that they do call you in for an interview and the interviewer tells you that you're so far the best sport and apparently know your git very well and you bond over it.

> I always do exactly one commit with a commit time of exactly when they sent me the take home.

Amazing I'm mixed on companies looking at start and end times. I think it would be ridiculous for them to actually check, but at the same time I'm curious how many people are going way over the time limit. I wonder if I should go over the time limit or not.

> And no not specifically to "cheat". Just on principle. If they require BS I give them BS. Else it's just fun.

Maybe this is controversial to say, but in reality, we're all "cheating" because we have to.

they can definitely enforce a strict time limit by only showing the exercise on a website that starts a countdown and telling you so. I'm okay with that. What I'm not okay with is being ambiguous about this and expecting me to game-theorize the risk-reward ratio of competing with people cheating.

I would rather feel the metagame is that you are being free labor for an actual problem/task they are having in the company.

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