Hacker News Reader

Comment by tharne | Hacker News Reader

If they have an interview process that involves a take home project or something similarly time intensive. To me that screams, "I don't care about any family responsibilities you may have, I want a bunch of childless 20-twenty somethings I can burn and churn".

View on HN

That's what all these are.. The 6 hour assignments, the 10pm happy hour team meet and greet - it's not about skill it's about proving you have no other responsibilities.

I failed one of those take-home projects (got about 1/3 of it in probably 3x the time) but felt it was a pretty good experience because it got me to try a kind of coding I'd always been interested in but never did.

I was asked a while back to do a 4–6 hour take-home project. I would have told them where to stick their 4–6 hour project, except it involved writing a Flask server, and I wanted to learn how to write a Flask server.

I wasn't offered the job, but I regret nothing.

Don't forget desperate, because people with options would likely skip.

I've done plenty of code tests in the past, these days it would take A LOT to motivate me.

Usually I just say thanks, but no thanks if they insist on testing me.

We have a take home assignment as a screening stage, but we ask candidates to time box it to 45min. Some folks refuse to do it and that's fine, but most are pretty open to it.

What do you do when people refuse?

I know I probably would, so I'm curious.

Given how much time an interview process usually takes, I don't think 45 minutes is a lot to ask; if I were the interviewer or were setting policy, I'd advocate for, "sorry you feel that way, but we won't be able to continue the interview in that case".

Then again, not completely sure what the GP means about "screening stage"; if a take-home assignment is given before any kind of substantive interaction between the company and me, that'd be a definite red flag. I'm not going to spend 45 minutes doing your resume screening for you.

We screen resumes and then based on resume we send this out as a technical screen. So the interaction is an invitation to do the screening exercise. It's the best way that we have found to eliminate candidates that don't meet the technical bar out of a huge pool of candidates.

What if I asked my future boss to perform a test of my choice that took as long?

The thing is that any kind of test is going to signal a lack of trust, and that's not a great way to start.

I guess it was misleading when I said "that's fine". For certain roles it's required, so if a candidate refuses, we pass... It just signals that we're not a great fit for each other. We treat this as a technical screener. We get a lot of applicants for these roles and we need to quickly eliminate candidates that are not technical enough.

I'm torn on that. On one hand I agree with you that it's possibly a bit tone-deaf to ask people to spend a significant amount of their time outside their interview working on a take-home assignment. But:

* Live coding during an interview sucks. I'm not convinced interviewers actually learn all that much useful during those, and I know a lot of people who perform well on the job but choke up during interviews when there's a live coding component.

* It's not like there isn't precedent for this sort of thing outside tech. For example, marketing/sales positions will often require the interviewee to prep a mock presentation specifically for the interview. (That is, not something generic they can use for multiple interviews.)

I get that people have commitments outside of work, and that the ideal situation is that you're interviewing for a job while you already have one (so interviewing work is going to be on top of all your existing responsibilities). But at the same time, take-home assignments in tech are becoming more common, and refusing to do them is going to limit your options. And I don't think the usual "well I probably wouldn't enjoy working at a company that does $THING during their interviews" really applies here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com