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Comment by qmmmur | Hacker News Reader

This is a classic case of misreading the subtext. They want you to be independent and able to create your own work and goals. The ambiguity of the take home task is not there for you to interrogate over multiple emails, rather its an open palette for you to show how you take a relatively broad task and produce your own interrogation of the problem space.

As someone who works at a university this is very reminiscent of students who don't understand the assignment then complain when they get an unexpected mark.

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I completely agree. The assigment seems to be looking for someone who will make as minimaly clever functional solution as possible. Someone who will dare to “be lazy” in interview where they want to impress.

This is not that common trait. But if your company has more prototype driven approach with quick “experiment” releases some people are just very bad fit and thats bad for everyone.

There is probably a candidate that thought for 10 minutes - what best can be done in 60min. They probably leveraged some http auth and forms, run that through tiny go backend, sent it with brief email. And they most likely looked a lot better in the process.

> misreading the subtext

I mean it's right there in the text itself.

That would maybe be a valid point if the take home set any context beyond "it's an R&D project" and "minimal".

What do you want to achieve here, is this a throwaway prototype or would a user ever see this? Am I going to get picked on for imperfect UX or do you just want to see something. It becomes an exercise in guessing the reviewers sensibilities.

Guessing the sensibilities of people is a large part of experimental software design and research. So I would say that the interview task is working as intended :)

Broadly, sure. You probably know who your audience is. But how'd I know who my recruiter is, individually. Is stalking their social media presence part of the exercise?

... and for every such Choose Your Own Adventure assignment there will be many people rejected because they "misread the subtext" and did not keep pushing for requirements, which is a very important virtue in engineers!

Life isn't fair, but apparently we expect more from hiring managers. And since life isn't fair we continue to get disappointed by hiring managers.

Should we feel bad about the hiring managers?

Hiring manager:

- Gets paid to perform the interviews

- Spends a 15 minutes answering emails and reviewing the solutions

Candidate(s):

- Does not get paid for their time

- Spends anywhere between 4 to 20 hours (or more) creating the solution

> As someone who works at a university this is very reminiscent of students who don't understand the assignment then complain when they get an unexpected mark.

This is such a lazy and convenient conclusion for someone that is giving out instructions.

Another valid reason that the students might misunderstand an assignment is because they cannot read minds and the instructions are poorly written.

Good teachers are the ones that make themselves understood by the largest amount of students. Bad teachers are the opposite.

With my best teachers, I never had to question their grading, because it was transparent from the start. So if you are getting a lot of confused students, you might be the common denominator.

Buddhist monks learn by solving riddles and guessing the messages of cryptic messages called Koans. Lets agree that students at a faculty, literally paying for tuition, should not be subject to the same practice.

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