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Comment by wldlyinaccurate | Hacker News Reader

You know what? I wish companies let me play with their codebase in an interview. At least then I could see how much truth there is to all the "yeah we totally have a great automated test suite and build process" I get told during interviews.

A whole day is unreasonable, but I'd jump at the chance to do what TFA describes as "free work" for an hour or so.

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I wish I could have gone back in time to look at a codebase before saying yes to a job. I wouldn't have taken it had I seen it.

I would hate to find myself in a situation like that, but bad code isn't the only thing to look out for. I would dread finding out 80% of their code came from open source and that they made it a point to not contribute the changes back to the community. This would really rile my feathers. Particularly if they asked applicants about their open source contributions.

The truth of this statement makes me weep inside.

Jump at the chance to look at the codebase. A whole day coding, I get the concern there, but yes, otherwise, I urge you a thousand times, look at the codebase.

For bonus points: can they provide instructions for you that allow you to go from zero to working dev-environment within a day?

At my last company, we gave a toy test outside the codebase for code production skills (basically a skeleton and some unit test to make green) and a simple task (changing a color, swapping an icon etc.) inside the production code for the navigation and orientation skills. A secondary target was that the candidate had seen the real production code in the real IDE, with a future co-worker next to him before accepting the job.

We would hog the candidate's time for half a day, but it was not half a day of production for us, it was also a lengthy team lunch at a restaurant, and a lot of talk.

Ah, that's a good idea. I'd negotiate it down to an hour or two, then when they pull me over to an iMac, I'd pull out my laptop instead and be like, "OK, let's do this! Where's the repo? Are you using Vagrant? Great, I already have it installed. What's the command to run the tests?"

If after the allotted time I still don't have a working dev environment, well, that job's not for me.

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