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I'm a staff engineer with ADHD and extreme test anxiety. When looking for another job during COVID I was rejected by every company at the screening stage I spoke to. The only offer I got was for Netflix which gave me a take-home assignment. It was wonderful because I had confidence in my code when I brought it back to the interviewers and could explain very clearly what was going on.

I ended up not taking the job due to the combination of a counter-offer from my employer as well as being a little weirded out by their culture. But I was thankful to get the opportunity to show my skills in a way that worked for me.

I feel you. I have adhd as well. I have routines when I code which some people don’t like or can’t follow and that caused problems during interviews. When I do pair coding today with people I worked with for a while now that’s not a problem because they understand my style and they don’t mind because they are good people.

But most people don’t understand why I do the thing I do and start saying no and that’s not supposed to go there and why aren’t you writing a test first? Because I don’t want to. I will arrive at your conclusion don’t worry just please give me time. I will move this code around don’t worry about it. There you see now it’s all fine. But they don’t understand that I just want something to work fast and then I’ll refactor and make it nice.

And then they start demanding and that’s when my flow breaks and then I do shit work because they force me to accept their views.

Ofc granted those are shitty workplaces but chances are I’m not gonna work with the person interviewing me and also when you are looking for a job without a job then you kinda don’t care and want it make it work somehow.

Bah.

Anyone who doesn’t understand “make it work, then make it nice” isn’t a real engineer :)

Now imagine you are a candidate interviewing with 3 companies and they all give you a take-home assignment and each one takes a weekend to complete.

Ideally it shouldn't take more than 4 hours, but even then is it that different than traveling to a different city for an onsite day of whiteboard interviews?

Ideally yeah but does it ever take "only" 4 hours? Usually take-homes are pretty unguided and leave room for personalization, plus there's an element of pressure to them to make it "awesome," do all of the best practices, etc. At least with a pair coding session there's someone there setting the guard rails to keep you within 1h.

> At least with a pair coding session there's someone there setting the guard rails to keep you within 1h

And then you're still nervous and have to explain your thought process around everything you're doing as you're coding.

In reality people are trying to put food on their table and they will spend the entire weekend polishing their submission. If you don't follow suit your submission is going to look comparatively bad.

It is different than traveling to a different city for an onsite because you're not wasting your teams time on a candidate unless you think they have a good chance of getting to the end. You have "skin in the game" as they say.

If hiring managers were only issuing homework to candidates already scheduled for a full round of interviews, so interviewers have standardized material to talk about and as a substitute for whiteboarding, it wouldn't be so bad. Instead you mostly get nothing to show for your time and when you do get a round of interviews nobody looks at what you did and wants you to do medium+hard leetcode on the shared screen.

and this is a problem why exactly? if you have three interviews on the same friday you may want to space that out :)

It's an employer's market. Why would an employer want to wait 3-4 weeks for someone to interview elsewhere when there's a dozen other candidates in the pipeline?

OK - if it is “employer market” than you as a candidate can suck it up and either stay up all night and finish all three take-homes or pick 1 or 2 of the employers to interview with.

on a side note - if employer does not want to wait and wants to rush the hire chances are you don’t want to work there anyways…

I disagree with the assertion of “rushing the hire” right now.

Nobody in their right mind is waiting on 1 candidate for several weeks to maybe hear from them unless there aren’t other good options.

And unless you’re notorious and exceptional, there are a lot of good options in the stack of resumes right now.

I feel the same. I'd much rather do a take-home than a live coding intervie: it offers a much better representation of how I work daily.

If you’re getting quality hires with take homes, doesn’t that mean that even if theres filtering going on, its still effective to a degree as opposed to being totally arbitrary?

I would think so, but we'll have 100 people come in and talk about the quality hires they get from LeetCode interviews.

A lot of people have a strange sort of amnesia where they forget anything that doesn't support their preconceptions. I've had conversations that go like this:

"Our interview process is perfect! We've never had a bad hire."

"What about that guy we hired to rewrite our engine? The ex-googler? We had to fire him after a month."

"Oh, yeah. I forgot about him."

I generally dislike take homes because the grading criteria is often extremely arbitrary and making time for them alongside your day job can only be done on nights and weekends.

The only exception to this are take homes that you pair on during the interview.

We do the same thing - take home - but we pay flat fee of $250 (via Visa Prepaid Card), more to show that we value candidates time than anything else… it should take about 4 hours to finish at worst.