Hacker News Reader

Ime take-homes was a good way to purge all the good candidates with options from your pipeline as they would simply not turn anything in and go with someone else. Maybe with AI and so many layoffs it’s better now I haven’t tried in last couple of years though i doubt it

View on HN

People have been telling me that for 18 years and (a) we've hired our fair share of candidates with gold-plated resumes (and stopped hiring candidates that only had gold-plated resumes, acquired from failing up) and (b) the nontraditional background candidates we've hired have generally been our top performers.

Hiring in most of the tech industry is gatekept, and like every protectionist scheme, it isn't organized for productivity.

Take homes are much lower signal now with AI

Depends on what you ask, i suppose. I’m sure i can come up with something that can’t simply be one shot or the result would be bad if you do. A bit more difficult on logistics tho as you’d have to arrange for an environment with some prepaid llm access

Without a way to estimate "AI power" used for the task I don't see how you can fairly rate home assignments.

Like i said either use pre-baked env or give a candidate an auth token with something like $100-200 quota from the provider your company already uses

Reply on news.ycombinator.com