Why Take Home Tests Suck: A Developer's Perspective on Hiring Practices | Hacker News Reader

Why Take Home Tests Suck: A Developer's Perspective on Hiring Practices

medium.com

I think the author is giving home tests an unfairly high grade.

It deserves at least another article, but just assume there are 10,000 companies with on average 100 positions in each and a 1,000,000 applicants, and each applies to each. Well, maybe not too realistic, but could be illustrative. So, each candidate gets 10,000 tests to solve to get a position, which is many human-years of work. Clearly non-working situation.

I tend to only do these when desperate. And I found best companies don't need to rely on such gimmicks.

OK, what's the alternative? Networking? I never invested in networking in my life, I just moved on every time (did not help that I was a contractor for 8 years).

How is a potential employer / customer to know if I am not a middle-aged scam?

Numbers and variables, please. No hand-waving.

I am listening. Give it to me bullet point by bullet point. Somebody wants to know if I am a proper programmer and not a scammer.

(And no, I never had time or energy to do any open-source. I am looking to change that but I've been "looking" for 4 years now and almost no progress has been made so clearly my current life and career are unsustainable and don't lend themselves to actively doing open-source.)

There is no method superior to simply talking to the person and working through a problem. It doesn't matter if you solve the problem; I have no idea why some people get so stuck on this. If the person is non-communicative or just not bright; it becomes obvious.

Hm, yes, I can see that, and I had positive experiences with that method.

Probably not a popular answer but: leetcode

Put in a couple months of effort (less if you're not as slow as me) to rememorize how to do those problems, and then apply them in any interview for any company that does leetcode questions.

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