Comment by willio58 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by willio58 | Hacker News Reader

Indeed. Last year I more than doubled my income by applying with the “click to apply” feature on indeed with a 4 sentence long cover letter.

Later I had a couple short zoom culture interviews and a take-home project which I sunk 10 hours into and outshined 30 other applicants. Offer in my inbox in less than 7 days. Mind you, this was after a grand total of like 20+ hours of interviews at other companies, with on the spot algo tests and all.

Here’s what I’ve learned: I will not subject myself to algo interviews. I just don’t think that’s what I want the companies I work for to value most in their devs. I want take-home projects with clear instructions. I want culture interviews where they are truly trying to see if I’d be a good fit.

Since I got hired I’ve actually helped hire a couple devs. Even as someone who went the traditional route of majoring in CS at a university I’ll say this: I don’t care how you got your knowledge. I just want to see real projects you’ve worked on. The sheer amount of people who apply even from prestigious schools like Stanford who have a mostly empty GitHub is staggering to me. I don’t care how much money you spent on education, show me the code!

I am programming since 1995. I got my first job in 2007. Pretty sure that not single line of my code is online. Maybe except couple forum/reddit snippets.

I have two kids, couple family friends, one hobby and I like to watch basketball and old movies. Outside of work I spend some time here and couple subreddits. I do not have time for the side projects on GitHub or to prepare for silly LC tests. I do not have time to create LinkedIn account and keep it updated.

I have CV with average EU Uni and uninterrupted 16 years across many different domains and with different tech stacks.

I refuse to do following:

- LC tests

- take home.

On another hand we can have interview for 6 hours about your business domain or system design.

I think that’s a fair take. People feel comfortable with different things. Even in school I always surpassed others on take home assignments and struggled during tests.

There’s another aspect in your comment too, and that’s seniority. I was born a year after you started programming, so GitHub and online portfolios were just a natural thing for me to take on. If you have people that will vouch for you and you have decades under your belt, you can more easily get away with no leetcode and no take home.

Actually I am only 12 years older than you. :) I had a lot luck to get my first computer early and was exposed to QBasic in dad's company.

>you can more easily get away with no leetcode and no take home.

Current rate in the last three months is around 75%. (which demands LC or take home)

Survivor bias. It worked for you.

People apply for dozens of jobs, if they had to spend 10 hours on a take home project each, it would add up to hundreds of total hours working on pointless toy projects just for the chance to get a job. That's like working full time for a month or two. Not counting the time spent to get up to that point (finding open job listings, editing resume, submitting application, doing screening interviews, etc.)

Absolutely. This just ended up being a company with a mission I actually cared about, using a tech stack that had my mouth watering, and a project prompt that allowed for creativity and showing my full-stack chops in a way I hadn't experienced in take-home projects before. I should clarify, I was done with the prompt in 1 hour. But the frontend aspect of the prompt was very much like "show us what you can do", and that's the type of thing that gets me going.

But I totally agree with your point. I think that if a take-home project goes over a couple hours it should be paid. Some companies do this, but not enough.

In a sense the take home assignment without enforced time limit selects for candidates that are most committed (or, alternatively, desperate, if you will).

That may or may not be a good thing, depending on the situation. But the downside is that the company would lose out on the potential applicants who can demonstrate skill in interviews, are in high demand, and can't be bothered to spend time on take homes.

Definitely true. The only issue with the idea of enforcing strict time limits on take-home projects is you pretty quickly get back to the same issues people including myself have with Leetcode and the like.

Like actual day-to-day work, just give me a prompt and a recommended time limit and I'll try to fit it to that and I might go above and beyond depending on a number of factors.

It's a situation where you have to pick your poison as an interviewee. Either subject yourself to the stress and lack of meaning that is leetcode (just my perspective), or be prepared to waste a few hours of your life on a project that doesn't wow your potential employer. I'd rather take the latter and hope I can learn something valuable along the way.

> I just want to see real projects you’ve worked on.

This gave me a business idea (AI business perhaps): anonymize your employer's codebase, enough so you can post it on GitHub without violating your terms of employment.

Ah yes, getting sued as a service

Here’s a slightly different take: uniquely ai-generated project idea that you can do, get graded on, and use when applying to multiple companies. No issue with anonymity at that point, and it would be much less work on the programmer than multiple take home projects

> a take-home project which I sunk 10 hours into

10 (ten) hours? youre gonna outshine other applicants cuz most of them (and a lot of HN) isn't going to do that.

don't put more time into the app then they'll put into you.

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