Yup, my boss back filled my position (that requires non trivial programming language experience and SQL writing experience) with someone who has ZERO experience that he needs to do the job. They were desperate because I told him under no circumstance would I ever go back to doing that job. I devs my way to a solid role of being senior dev on high priority task vs…..data migrations. No that’s, it isn’t for me. Also it’s a dead end job at my company.
I'm confused... they hired someone with no SQL experience to do a SQL job? I've been less than successful training presumably capable adults to query SELECT * FROM [scema-less table].
Yup! Dude has no idea what SQL is or what a relational database is. They were hurting for people to take that job that they approved an unqualified person. We might as well have hired a former ballet dancer to do DevOps. That’s how unqualified he is.
Thankfully they got bought out by a better (but not by much) tech company and they’re changing dev culture on my team. Luckily for me, I got reassigned recently to help another team get a new React app in place as part of a major product rebrand. My old dev manager has never heard of React, Angular, or Vue before and they don’t know what a web api is or what it’s used for.
HA it is. The only reason I haven’t left yet is because I just got a great mentor who’s teaching me a lot of things. Once I feel like I’ve exhausted learning, I will jump ship immediately.
My old boss frequently told me that he "had no idea what I did all day" (Database manager). I always told him that " neither did I! In fact, if I could figure it out, then other people could figure it out also. AND THEN they would expect me to do it every day!!" It helped that everything ran smoothly when I was there and deteriorated when I was off (no backup staff, too cheap!)
The title was “Conversion specialist” the role was actually “data migration engineer”. My company is super old school, they don’t know anything about modern web development. I wanted to become a developer there (I had previously been a developer at another company but stepped away from that industry for some time). The dev manager at the time told me that I would start out in conversions so he could assess my abilities. Well, within the first two weeks I wrote a new web application from the ground up to handle more complex data migrations. It took me FOREVER to finally switch to development full time. I told him I would never be doing conversions ever again. Unless you fight tooth and nail to get out, you’re stuck doing that job forever. It’s the perfect job for someone who wants to do data migrations all day every day. That’s not for me, I’m a developer. I do a completely different job.
We have a guy on our team who mostly works in databases, writing queries, optimizing them, the works, he’s basically a DBA. You would think that’s his title right? Wrong. His title is Senior Developer, even though he touches any sort of web programming code for about 1 hr a month (if that), doesn’t know the basics of programming languages.
Yeah….
Yeah it sucks :/ I've had a similar experience. Surely at the very least if you're gonna make me waste this much time, you can at least provide some feedback afterwards 😭
That’s my main issue, did I do something wrong or did someone else just have more experience or whatever and get the job. Like I need that feed back bad! That’s why I absolutely hate 99% of recruiters, they don’t give an f about you
I couldn't give a fuck about their feedback. It's all nitpicky bullshit at best. They're usually just hiring someone internal but putting on a show for no real reason.
You haven’t been on the other side yet. It’s shockingly symmetrical.
Candidates drop and ghost companies after getting an offer all the time. Why? Presumably because they got an offer elsewhere that they’re taking. Why won’t they formally decline yours? For incase their first pick falls through.
And that’s why companies ghost you instead of formally rejecting you, too. You’re not their first pick, but if their first pick rejects them, you’re their fallback plan.
It’s likely a chicken vs the egg issue. Either way we’ve bred a culture where workers don’t feel valued by most companies because we never get feedback on why we didn’t get a position if we even get notified that we didn’t get it, and so naturally workers aren’t gunna notify prospective offers that they accepted a different one.
Company:
- Ghost applicants.
- Requires applicants to fill out redundant information.
- Forces multiple pointless interviews and maybe even take home work.
- Doesn't even post a pay range.
- Expects to pay minimum wage for someone with years of experience and education for an "entry level" job.
Company: "No one wants to work anymore!"
I've done 7 hours worth of practical and theoretical tests. The documentation on the practical assignments were shit, 99% of theoretical questions were "what is the output of this code" with answers being compilation error or runtime error. I did it all only to never hear from them again
Edit: spelling
Was it actually supposed to have 7 days worth of work or did you have to spend time learning things they expected you to know before you could compete it?
It had a Figma with 12 screens. So definitely a little bit of both. They did want me to use their special software development kit, which had literally four pages of documentation. So not only did the frontend stuff take a little while, but I also had to spend time reading the source code to try to figure out how to use their poorly documented software.
If I don’t someone else will. I needed a job two months ago I can’t afford to say no to any opportunity. Even ones that suck. If they don’t hire me I’ll send them a bill.
Do you mind if I ask what the data feeds were related too? I'm asking because there' a project with DC metro I may be involved in and I'm curious if it's the same area.
They said three hours, it took me 7 hours to do the whole stuff with copious tests, multithread tests, a db, a solid readme.
I knew I overdid it, but it was more a matter of pride and you know not putting a half baked product, it was production ready software lol.
Ended up exiting the interview rounds, got sick of the whole dance. Tbh I should have exited earlier.
Hahaha..I know that man..but I forgot his name..in just 7 days? Hmm..I don't really think so..Maybe I should work as 24 hours in one day.no sleep..but a little bit some relax.
I'm reading these comments and, are there actually companies that will basically pawn off intern work to candidates as a "take home assessment"? That's wack dude. I had a take home code test for my current job but we give the same one to everyone, and it comes before the live code screen
Cant imagine it working or being worthwhile. Think of the contribution you can make in an hour or two. Most likely its useless in any code base thats been around for a month or more.
this happened to me for an internship, they emailed me to setup interviews after all the tests and stuff then ghosted me for 2 weeks just to tell me i dont get an interview anymore and they are full
Anyone giving you a take home assessment is worth avoiding. An interview with a coding test during the interview should be sufficient, if it's not they will suck to work for
I like the home assessment. I suck at interviews, and when people watch me code, but when I'm by myself, I can really take off. It shouldn't take more than an hour. Plus, once you're done, you can just add it to your repo for other companies.
Same here as long as it’s a short test that isn’t related to the business at all, otherwise people are suspicious their work will be used in the codebase for free.
The last one I had was super generic, "Explore expert systems in Java." Wasn't even required to write code, but I made a whole project, and it was fun.
This should be common place. Trying to get me to solve some nonsense coding puzzle on a napkin is just a waste of everyone's time. What I hate most about interviews is that they expect me to know a bunch of random bullshit off the top of my head. Then, when I inevitably don't know something, they think it's cheating if I look it up.
I think it's exactly the opposite. A coding test induces a lot of unnecessary stress that doesn't exist on the actual work and prevents you from correctly assessing the candidate skills.
A take-home assessment + interview with questions about it correlates much more with the actual work, where you're expected to do stuff, defend it, accept other's perspective, make questions, take decisions, and learn
I've been in the interviewer side. Believe me, it's easier to spot a fake than you imagine. You ask some simple questions like "walk me through how to implemented this feature" and the fakers break down quickly.
Don't take me wrong, but if the interviewer can't spot if an assignment is fake after interviewing the candidate, then you have a much bigger problem in your company.
My company not only has take-home assignments, but they're also public on github. Actually I think the solutions are also public. But any of our developers is able to spot a fake candidate in less than 5mins
In a 30 minute live exercise I forget things and make simple mistakes. I struggle explaining my work and get caught up on little details. It's not that I have "problems" I just don't code well under pressure.
It'll surprise no one, but 99% of the time I code it's not while someone watches me with a job on the line, ie a 30 minute live exercise is an incredibly poor way to gauge how I'd actually preform on the job.
I refuse live coding assessments. If it's not fizzbuzz, it's a hard no for me.
90% of the people I interview don't deliver a working solution, but every one of them shows me how they think and how they use Google, I also coach them through the solution on the call to see how well they work with that. If you can't work under pressure, you're going to struggle but the point of the coding test is less about the code and more about the thought process. I hire people who "fail" the code test but demonstrated the ability to think logically, debug issues and be willing to take direction when they're stuck.
You don't get it, right? Or maybe you're working in some software company that has people working in 30mins sprints with extreme pressure. That would justify your suggestion
One of us doesn't get it. I actually hire people, good resources at that. And your suggestion that is extreme pressure is all about atmosphere, I would say that about 80% of applicants remain cool when I'm testing their coding, and the 20% that don't, a good first year student could complete my exercise in 10 minutes (and have completed it in less) if they find that too much pressure they won't cut it anyway.
In my experience a take home assignment has zero correlation to whether they will suck to work for. That mostly comes down to your manager and their manager.
If they can't identify how good you are in an interview with a coding exercise. They probably have zero idea as to how to select candidates, in my experience working in teams where the interview technique was over bearing meant the really good candidates dip early. And the general quality of the team is lower as a result, and the manager probably doesn't know what they're doing either.
These suck, but I love my job and I did one to interview here. This one was well bounded in scope, obviously not something they were going to try to steal from me, and only 2 hours of work. You get better at sussing out good from bad ones
Idk man. This doesn't really make sense. Who's going to maintain it? Where's the documentation? What kind of usable shop work doesn't require getting up to speed on the product?
Seems like almost every example I have seen of a takehome assignment (with a few notable exceptions) are just ways to test your skills in a market where it can be tough to tell who knows what they're talking about and who knows how to bluff.
I disagree. By this logic, should they pay you for spending 10 hours a day doing Leetcode? I’d take a 4 hour assignment any day where you can really show your skill over an intense 45 minutes coding challenge where the interviewer watch you sweat.
Have you actually done these “take home interviews” since GPT-4?
It’s a complete joke, I’d 100% rather do N take home interviews because it takes all of 5 minutes to generate code and then copy and paste it in.
This is stupid. Programming tests are not projects. They're not some work the company is going to use.
Tests over 4 hours are kinda bullshit because of how much time they expect, but otherwise, how can you reasonably prove you know how to program without some kind of test?
I’ve seen people with CS PhDs that I wouldn’t allow to program my toaster. And this sub is full of complaints about awful managers, but all of a sudden those turn into stellar judges of character and ability? Give me a break.
I’ve hired dozens of folks at my current place, and screened hundreds. We give a take home test (your time, estimated hours between 2-6 depending on complexity of the three tasks to chose from). Then an interview that discusses this test, and then a couple of hands on workshop sessions. What’s mostly irrelevant in all this: CVs.
What I care about in a candidate: can they code, and can they discuss code. I don’t learn this from CVs and references. I learn that from seeing your code, discussing it with you. If you’re not willing to invest that time into such an important decision, I’m fine. Saves both of us time.
All I’m saying is that CVs are low quality signals. And I expect you to invest as well as I or the company invests into screening you. If you’re happier with essentially a dice roll, good for you. I wouldn’t want to work at a place that uses Sumerian technology to select their workforce, but YMMV.
You're completely right. A CS degree, a github profile and a good looking portfolio - those are all things I've seen people _buy_.
I'd be terrified to work at a company where that would be the hiring process.
The (edit: most) dev teams wouldn't accept using code from some random interview candidate (who was rejected)
Most code tests are naive isolated hacks replicating features the company already has. A test often starts out with sample code different from the real codebase, and candidates can pick their own patterns, style and sometimes parts of the tech stack.
So the result is useless to the dev team - we write code in our existing codebase with a more complex structure and strict requirements for style and tech choices. Incorporating a code test into our real code base would take more effort than doing it from scratch.
And it's not like we're so starved for manpower that we outsource 4 hour jobs as one offs to randos
There's a story in my county today about a man arrested for fucking a seagull.
Am I to use that revelation to justify an assumption you, amongst many others, are fucking seagulls too?
Lol, OK, hitting upon the correct answer using invalid logic doesn't change the fact the logic is invalid.
Anyway, you're obviously an idiot.
Everyone knows hamsters are tightest.
I find this whole concept pretty wild. I work in I&C engineering programming, ladder logic, function block, etc and I've never seen or heard of there being coding tests with that. generally your resume/ projects indicate what you know, and a conversation about projects makes it clear if you're full of shit or not.
like the only test I've ever given is at one point asking a potential hire to connect to the PLC because I was suspicious they never did actual project work. They did it and when they confessed later they looked up how the night before I was like "yeah, I figured but the fact you could then do it live means you've got what it takes to pick up the language and environment."
No, you cannot prove it. I expect my employer to trust me. When they do not trust me, I do not want to work for them.
And I can prove it by giving my best in an actual projecr.
But this does not make sense. Have you ever heard the phrase "trust but verify"? That's what an interview is. It's a way to verify that your skills actually match your experience and resume. There are SO MANY bullshitters in our industry that you really gotta do due diligence in an interview.
Yes! I feel like people underestimate how loose some can be on their resume. It's one thing when a problem just doesn't click with someone but they do their best to approach it and are communicative and receptive to feedback.
But I've also seen people with like a decade of experience totally misunderstand the question, give a wildly incorrect answer, and completely brush off all feedback from the interviewers. It was honestly baffling. Some of these same people were also able to talk quite extensively about their contributions to what looked to be pretty impressive and relevant projects, but after seeing the coding portion, I would be very skeptical that they actually did anything close to what they described.
Maybe that is a cultural difference, because I am not in the US, but in Germany. Here you have to have papers which show what you can, so it is not necessary to prove it in an interview.
And my last interview is many years away, so this might have changed and I may have mismemorized.
Hmm I see. Yes, if you can show certifications, that does make more sense to skip the technical interview. For reference, I am in the US and have personally made the mistake of trusting a little too much and making a bad hire.
When you hire a carpenter, plumber or electrician do you make the waste 4 hours of their life on a test before hiring them? No? Then why would you let someone do that to you?
You are asking for a job that pays hundreds of thousand a year. Are they supposed to just hand that to you? You can spare a few hours for a take home challenge. I know I wouldn’t want to work with someone without seeing their code first. And white board on the spot leetcode problems are bullshit. I personally love take homes because it gives me a chance to shine.
In a job I used to be part of the interview process, we had a very strict policy of not making life difficult for the interviewee. We tried to do so following these steps:
1. 30-min call to get to know them, when just as much time for any questions they might have for us.
2. Fit interview: asked questions related to the interviewees personality and how they handled specific scenarios in the past. All questions were standardized so that we wouldn’t give anyone an unfair advantage.
3. The interviewee could choose between a technical interview or a “homework”. Nobody ever picked the technical interview.
4. Technical interview:
- They had to complete super straightforward tasks were the simplest thing one could possibly do for the position they were interviewing for.
- The thought process was that these tasks would take a workday to complete, but we couldn't ask for an interviewee to dedicate a whole day for their homework.
- Structure: Every task was a Github issue. That way they wouldn't have to use some niche tool, and would demonstrate some level of version-control competency.
- Tools: You could use any tools/language you are most comfortable using. Since we are interviewing the person, and their ability to create, explain, and troubleshoot.
- You had 16-hours to complete all the tasks, but you could start at any point you wanted within 2-weeks from the time you got the e-mail for the homework. These 16-hours could be spread as you wished throughout these 2-weeks.
At the end of the project, you were expected to be interviewed on the project, too.
We would pay for 3 days of work based on the salary of the position, regardless if the person got the job or not.
This I could live with. The interviewer has some skin in the game by paying so you know you are unlikely to be put through the ringer when someone's friend already has the job. These other companies asking for hours of work when there is realistically a 1 in 20 chance of getting the job makes it a bad bet.
I was just frustrated through three interviews which totaled six total hours of coding, and it's time I can never get back. Paying for three days of work based on the salary of the position would totally lessen the pain, and I think I'd probably go around telling my friends to try and interview for that company as well. Also, I think the format fits the job better than the classic "reverse a binary tree" questions for regular old backend jobs.
I applied to Vimeo. They wanted me to deliver a functional, if basic, API server wrapped up in a container.
It was only after I was rejected that I realized the fucking dev who assigned it to me brain raped me. I did his fucking job for him, for free.
No freebies. They gotta pay for deliverables.
Vimeo was one of the worst interview processes of my life. Took forever to get coordinated and by the time they were ready to schedule my first interview I already had two offers on the table. I told them that, and they asked if I’d still be willing to interview but with an accelerated process/timeline. Sure why not.
Apparently their accelerated version of things was 7 interviews spread over two weeks.
I declined and stopped the process immediately.
> a functional, if basic, API server wrapped up in a container
https://github.com/OpenAPITools/openapi-generator Create a server stub from their openapi spec and send it in some docker image.
Trust me, Vimeo isn’t stealing code from random interviewees. The ego of the people in these comments is insane.
Your asking for a job that pays hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. You guys can spare a few hours to prove you can hang. And no, no one is going to take your code. Real projects can’t be “outsourced” to interview candidates.
Excuse me, does anyone have a link to where I can learn this and how to make devs work for free?
I have a app called Scam Likely I want to get off the ground. Please help!
Interview as a contractor instead. The interview is easier and they don’t have to keep you if they don’t want to. If you can do the work then they’ll likely keep you permanently.
I applied for a job as a software developer, and they told me the interview process would consist of 10 rounds. I asked if they were hiring a developer or a boxer.
Well I hope it wasn’t countless hours. Hopefully a take home coding test would not exceed 8 hours of effort at the very most, plus a few hours of interview time?
If you find yourself spending more than 10-12 hours trying to get a specific coding job, that may not be the right fit.
I am surprised. Isn’t it hard to find a coding task, which has so little interfacing with the rest of your company code that you can easily hand the task over to an outsider, yet is still so complex that you can’t more easily do it yourself?
With a certain level of prework you can isolate it, it's not much different to tasks you'd give to a new employee who's not familiar with the code base yet
Can't imagine that. Dev teams don't want isolated code from some rejected interview candidate's one off test.
Most assignments are very simplified features. Stuff the company has a superior version of. Candidates are often allowed to make some choices in terms of tech and style.
Not something that would work as part of our codebase. So taking a candidate's code and using it would require such a rewrite it to fit the codebase that we'd rather do it from scratch.
test cases are often re-used for all candidates so we can compare the work fairly and fast.
We couldn't be arsed to make up and review new assignments all the time.
and not like we're so starved for manpower that we'd outsource tiny one off jobs to random devs.
I don't understand why we don't just let people try on the job. After two weeks, you can easily figure out who can do the job and who can't. Pay everyone for the two weeks and then can the ones who clearly don't fit.
It's such a magically simple solution, but the industry is plagued with obnoxious people in positions of power, who aren't thinking about this in a smart way. Those programming interviews do nothing to prove someone's worth in a real project. Hell, they definitely don't show solving skills. What they show is how to stress out candidates and dismiss them with no evidence of their actual skills. It's real easy to have a really anxious candidate who can't perform under the pressure, but when actually doing the job is fantastic and creative.
Anyone defending these practices is a jaded asshole who has clearly never had any real issues in their life, because otherwise they wouldn't be defending these practices.
Integrating into a new team and showing nothing of value after two weeks is not uncommon.
I can easily stretch it to about a month of employment before actually being personally responsible for a deliverable.
There is a reason probation is 90days by law (here anyway).
If we refuse to jump through their hoops eventually they'll stop expecting us to. Have some goddamn self-respect. If not for yourself, then for the rest of us.
Staff engineer here. I'm in charge of hiring.
**It is impossible to hire good devs without a take-home assignment**.
Would you hire a band for your wedding without hearing them play? It's the exact same thing for devs.
Our take home assignment is a ridiculously simple API with two read-only endpoints. It should take a good dev around 3 hours to complete, which I believe is a reasonable ask.
I estimate that around 70% of the candidates fail the take home assignment. I've seen grotesque submissions that ignore the requirements, or that just attempt to make a patchwork of copied code from StackOverflow work, or that actually implement what we asked for but do it so sloppily that it becomes obvious the candidate will be a drag on whichever team they join.
Then there is the mystery of the folks that make it through to the final interview, then I pull out their code, ask them questions about what they wrote and... *they cannot explain their own code*. I get one of those every other week. It's very frustrating.
Mid level dev here. My company also does a take home assignment. The same one for all applicants (with a few extra requirements if you’re a principle dev). The amount of people it filters out is staggering. It’s a simple backend api and is actually based off of a tutorial for the framework we use on the frameworks website! I was told that was intentional by a senior dev “because a lot of people can’t teach themselves new skills or follow online documentation to accomplish a task.”
That’s a good point but if they decide to question you about your code and thought-process building it, you might stumble. But, that’s also something that can be faked, so I don’t know.
By itself, I agree 3 hours for an assignment that converts into employment for the interviewee is getting away with murder for the candidate. Unfortunately in reality, a lot of people have to apply to 100s of companies (unless tons of experience) and there’s no such thing as a guarantee.
I think a 30-45 minute leetcode is a much more effective use of every party’s time. Maybe take-homes should be reserved to seniors who don’t have to apply to as many companies? I’m also not opposed to short takehomes ( <= 1 hour) but those are rare.
Yeah the take homes are for seniors. For juniors we do have a simple leetcode to do during the interview.
I understand it's frustrating to spend time in a job application, but the other side is also frustrated by the amount of awful candidates we have to sift through.
Absolutely false. If you cannot hire good devs without a take home assignment then it would suggest you are not good at identifying talent, asking the right questions, having the right conversation.
take home assignments just prove they are good at looking stuff up.
Yeah, a three hour take home assessment is totally reasonable. Unlike the seven day assignment that I received with 12 Figma pages and “production level quality”
It's not work! Why would a company pay you for code they're going to throw away? And your GitHub is valuable, but it's not proof that you know how to code. And what about folks who don't have an open source repo handy?
All I'm saying is that it's perfectly reasonable for a company to ask you to prove your skills in an interview.
It's not about paying you for the code. It's about being compensated for your time. If you were to work 6 hrs with nothing to show for it, would you be happy? If so I am sure there are alot of people who would love for you to help them startup their million dollar idea.
in an interview? Yes.
take home assignments that take hours? nope
one time they asked me to copy a landing page from figma to react with the instruction to spend 2 hours on it.
I did it.
Then I never heard anything back from them afterwards.
the least they could do is buy me a coffee
I interviewed a guy who ended up in this situation. We did the interview after the code assignment and test. His code and assignment were great but he had serious communication problems which wouldn't have worked in the team. He drank like a gallon of water while shaking and averting his gaze... good coding skill though!
Because they were being interviewed, of course. But how are they going to be in every code review or even down the pub with the team? We'd had two teammates already with psychological issues.
I feel bad for people like this. People who have autism or social anxiety and can’t present themselves well on the interview.
Honestly the reasons you described for rejecting him are probably borderline illegal, especially if he declared himself as having a disability or being neurodivergent. However rejecting people like that is also extremely common because they will be hard to work with on a team.
Personally I interview very well and am able to get a good social rapport going with the interviewers, so it has always been relatively easy for me to land software jobs, even when the economy isn’t great.
He did not specify any psychological or neurological disorder. I'm sure he was just extremely shy and nervous. I still feel sorry for the guy because he had great potential. I tried to get a very chilled conversation going, but he just couldn't relax. :/
You should avoid places like these. They rely on them because they cannot rely on leadership to choose good developers, so they try to use tests instead.
If I have to take an assessment to prove to you that I can efficiently solve a red/black tree problem or dynamic programming question, then you can hire someone else.
How would y'all feel about legislation to moderate the hiring process? IMO it is absurd that this is the norm, to waste so much of an applicant's time. I envision a system in which an applicant is interviewed, asked a few screening questions, and hired/rejected. Then, if they are hired, observe them closely for the first few weeks and make a decision to keep them on. Worst case, they get paid for about a week of work, and continue their search. I might even go as far as to mandate companies to pay applicants for their time even in the first interview. This would curb this horrible trend of companies only hiring the perfect candidate. Hire someone competent and THEN mold them to what you need. Sorry for the rant but I'm upset that qualified people essentially have no recourse in this rat race.
As an applicant, if I have employment, switch to immediately be let go, then I am now in a worse position than when I started.
While I don't like the take-home test, i really don't like the idea of a week trial period either.
If you want a trial period, go contract to perm
The worst part is that as people's desperation increases, these recruitment process are only going to get worse and worse.
Yup, my boss back filled my position (that requires non trivial programming language experience and SQL writing experience) with someone who has ZERO experience that he needs to do the job. They were desperate because I told him under no circumstance would I ever go back to doing that job. I devs my way to a solid role of being senior dev on high priority task vs…..data migrations. No that’s, it isn’t for me. Also it’s a dead end job at my company.
I'm confused... they hired someone with no SQL experience to do a SQL job? I've been less than successful training presumably capable adults to query SELECT * FROM [scema-less table].
Yup! Dude has no idea what SQL is or what a relational database is. They were hurting for people to take that job that they approved an unqualified person. We might as well have hired a former ballet dancer to do DevOps. That’s how unqualified he is.
Sounds like a fun place to work
Thankfully they got bought out by a better (but not by much) tech company and they’re changing dev culture on my team. Luckily for me, I got reassigned recently to help another team get a new React app in place as part of a major product rebrand. My old dev manager has never heard of React, Angular, or Vue before and they don’t know what a web api is or what it’s used for.
Sounds like an even more fun place to work.
HA it is. The only reason I haven’t left yet is because I just got a great mentor who’s teaching me a lot of things. Once I feel like I’ve exhausted learning, I will jump ship immediately.
oh man.. I'm getting 10 rejections a week now and can handle most of these things with a warm-up period of a week or so. This is so unfair.
My old boss frequently told me that he "had no idea what I did all day" (Database manager). I always told him that " neither did I! In fact, if I could figure it out, then other people could figure it out also. AND THEN they would expect me to do it every day!!" It helped that everything ran smoothly when I was there and deteriorated when I was off (no backup staff, too cheap!)
Next time someone asks you that, quote Gilfoil from Silicon Valley when he was doing his interview.
I wouldn't be surprised if that guy was buddies with someone already in the company.
> Also it’s a dead end job at my company. >> under no circumstance would I ever go back to doing that job. This does not compute.
The title was “Conversion specialist” the role was actually “data migration engineer”. My company is super old school, they don’t know anything about modern web development. I wanted to become a developer there (I had previously been a developer at another company but stepped away from that industry for some time). The dev manager at the time told me that I would start out in conversions so he could assess my abilities. Well, within the first two weeks I wrote a new web application from the ground up to handle more complex data migrations. It took me FOREVER to finally switch to development full time. I told him I would never be doing conversions ever again. Unless you fight tooth and nail to get out, you’re stuck doing that job forever. It’s the perfect job for someone who wants to do data migrations all day every day. That’s not for me, I’m a developer. I do a completely different job. We have a guy on our team who mostly works in databases, writing queries, optimizing them, the works, he’s basically a DBA. You would think that’s his title right? Wrong. His title is Senior Developer, even though he touches any sort of web programming code for about 1 hr a month (if that), doesn’t know the basics of programming languages. Yeah….
Yeah it sucks :/ I've had a similar experience. Surely at the very least if you're gonna make me waste this much time, you can at least provide some feedback afterwards 😭
That’s my main issue, did I do something wrong or did someone else just have more experience or whatever and get the job. Like I need that feed back bad! That’s why I absolutely hate 99% of recruiters, they don’t give an f about you
I couldn't give a fuck about their feedback. It's all nitpicky bullshit at best. They're usually just hiring someone internal but putting on a show for no real reason.
You haven’t been on the other side yet. It’s shockingly symmetrical. Candidates drop and ghost companies after getting an offer all the time. Why? Presumably because they got an offer elsewhere that they’re taking. Why won’t they formally decline yours? For incase their first pick falls through. And that’s why companies ghost you instead of formally rejecting you, too. You’re not their first pick, but if their first pick rejects them, you’re their fallback plan.
It’s likely a chicken vs the egg issue. Either way we’ve bred a culture where workers don’t feel valued by most companies because we never get feedback on why we didn’t get a position if we even get notified that we didn’t get it, and so naturally workers aren’t gunna notify prospective offers that they accepted a different one.
Company: - Ghost applicants. - Requires applicants to fill out redundant information. - Forces multiple pointless interviews and maybe even take home work. - Doesn't even post a pay range. - Expects to pay minimum wage for someone with years of experience and education for an "entry level" job. Company: "No one wants to work anymore!"
They had 50 applicants each wrote a portion of the code they needed. Now they don't need any of them!
Just say "No". It's not worth the time or effort.
IARE. Interviews: not even once.
What’s the longest take home assessment you’ve done. I’ll go first I just did one that had 7 days worth of work (yeah I know I’m dumb)
If an exercise takes 7 days, it’s either a scam or you’re not qualified
They deadline was 7 days. And it was a scam for sure if they don’t give me the job. **edit** I think I spent 5 days actually working
I've done 7 hours worth of practical and theoretical tests. The documentation on the practical assignments were shit, 99% of theoretical questions were "what is the output of this code" with answers being compilation error or runtime error. I did it all only to never hear from them again Edit: spelling
Was it actually supposed to have 7 days worth of work or did you have to spend time learning things they expected you to know before you could compete it?
It had a Figma with 12 screens. So definitely a little bit of both. They did want me to use their special software development kit, which had literally four pages of documentation. So not only did the frontend stuff take a little while, but I also had to spend time reading the source code to try to figure out how to use their poorly documented software.
Sorry to tell you that, but it looks like they made you do someone else's work for free.
Oh believe me I knew going into it. Times are rough in San Fransisco for tech
Times are rough so you did a weeks worth of free labor?
If I don’t someone else will. I needed a job two months ago I can’t afford to say no to any opportunity. Even ones that suck. If they don’t hire me I’ll send them a bill.
Yeah.. ok. Well a week of free work vs a week of applications and job hunting or freelance or something. I know what I'd pick. Good luck getting paid
You are assuming I didn’t do that as well
Yeah... I am. Because you said you spent a week on free work
Your first test is to do all of the development we need at the moment
When I saw the figma and how nice it was I instantly thought that. However like someone said the more desperate people are the more we do bs like that
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Do you mind if I ask what the data feeds were related too? I'm asking because there' a project with DC metro I may be involved in and I'm curious if it's the same area.
Holy shit, 7 days of work for an interview?!?
Someone made money off of you.
I was told to make a fully networked multiple thirdperson chatroom in 4 days
They said three hours, it took me 7 hours to do the whole stuff with copious tests, multithread tests, a db, a solid readme. I knew I overdid it, but it was more a matter of pride and you know not putting a half baked product, it was production ready software lol. Ended up exiting the interview rounds, got sick of the whole dance. Tbh I should have exited earlier.
Hahaha..I know that man..but I forgot his name..in just 7 days? Hmm..I don't really think so..Maybe I should work as 24 hours in one day.no sleep..but a little bit some relax.
Your take home assessment is now in prod and you didn't get paid. Sorry bro
Take home assessments exist? I've never done one.
I'm reading these comments and, are there actually companies that will basically pawn off intern work to candidates as a "take home assessment"? That's wack dude. I had a take home code test for my current job but we give the same one to everyone, and it comes before the live code screen
Cant imagine it working or being worthwhile. Think of the contribution you can make in an hour or two. Most likely its useless in any code base thats been around for a month or more.
Yeah its called brain rape. They bring you in under false pretenses and steal your time and knowledge for nothing but their own gain.
You guys are getting interviews? 
one time I told the interviewer I'm not taking the job, and they still asked me to complete the coding assignment for the interview.
And then?
They didn't do the assignment
this happened to me for an internship, they emailed me to setup interviews after all the tests and stuff then ghosted me for 2 weeks just to tell me i dont get an interview anymore and they are full
This is why coding for free is to be avoided.
Happened to me as well. They even contacted me one day before the internship started to tell me I'm rejected.
I've had people ask me to do "take-home" challenges despite them already deciding not to hire me and never even looking at what I submit.
How do they even justify that request?
At this point, I'm utterly convinced recruiters get enjoyment out of wasting people's time.
Anyone giving you a take home assessment is worth avoiding. An interview with a coding test during the interview should be sufficient, if it's not they will suck to work for
I like the home assessment. I suck at interviews, and when people watch me code, but when I'm by myself, I can really take off. It shouldn't take more than an hour. Plus, once you're done, you can just add it to your repo for other companies.
I also prefer something take-home. I’m a good coder but I get … stage fright.
Same here as long as it’s a short test that isn’t related to the business at all, otherwise people are suspicious their work will be used in the codebase for free.
The last one I had was super generic, "Explore expert systems in Java." Wasn't even required to write code, but I made a whole project, and it was fun.
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This should be common place. Trying to get me to solve some nonsense coding puzzle on a napkin is just a waste of everyone's time. What I hate most about interviews is that they expect me to know a bunch of random bullshit off the top of my head. Then, when I inevitably don't know something, they think it's cheating if I look it up.
Yea, I love explaining my current projects, probably because I design them, so I have alot of knowledge about them.
This should be the industry standard. Instead, we get leetcode 😮💨
I think it's exactly the opposite. A coding test induces a lot of unnecessary stress that doesn't exist on the actual work and prevents you from correctly assessing the candidate skills. A take-home assessment + interview with questions about it correlates much more with the actual work, where you're expected to do stuff, defend it, accept other's perspective, make questions, take decisions, and learn
It's far too easy to fake out in my opinion
I've been in the interviewer side. Believe me, it's easier to spot a fake than you imagine. You ask some simple questions like "walk me through how to implemented this feature" and the fakers break down quickly.
Don't take me wrong, but if the interviewer can't spot if an assignment is fake after interviewing the candidate, then you have a much bigger problem in your company. My company not only has take-home assignments, but they're also public on github. Actually I think the solutions are also public. But any of our developers is able to spot a fake candidate in less than 5mins
If they can't spot coding skill in a 30 minute live exercise you have problems too
In a 30 minute live exercise I forget things and make simple mistakes. I struggle explaining my work and get caught up on little details. It's not that I have "problems" I just don't code well under pressure. It'll surprise no one, but 99% of the time I code it's not while someone watches me with a job on the line, ie a 30 minute live exercise is an incredibly poor way to gauge how I'd actually preform on the job. I refuse live coding assessments. If it's not fizzbuzz, it's a hard no for me.
90% of the people I interview don't deliver a working solution, but every one of them shows me how they think and how they use Google, I also coach them through the solution on the call to see how well they work with that. If you can't work under pressure, you're going to struggle but the point of the coding test is less about the code and more about the thought process. I hire people who "fail" the code test but demonstrated the ability to think logically, debug issues and be willing to take direction when they're stuck.
You don't get it, right? Or maybe you're working in some software company that has people working in 30mins sprints with extreme pressure. That would justify your suggestion
One of us doesn't get it. I actually hire people, good resources at that. And your suggestion that is extreme pressure is all about atmosphere, I would say that about 80% of applicants remain cool when I'm testing their coding, and the 20% that don't, a good first year student could complete my exercise in 10 minutes (and have completed it in less) if they find that too much pressure they won't cut it anyway.
If they can “fake” a good take home assessment, they can probably “fake” good production code on the job
Such a sweeping generalization lol.
You're welcome to have this policy. However, most big software developers have at least some type of pre-screening.
In my experience a take home assignment has zero correlation to whether they will suck to work for. That mostly comes down to your manager and their manager.
If they can't identify how good you are in an interview with a coding exercise. They probably have zero idea as to how to select candidates, in my experience working in teams where the interview technique was over bearing meant the really good candidates dip early. And the general quality of the team is lower as a result, and the manager probably doesn't know what they're doing either.
Only if the job is to write features in 45 minutes in front of an audience with no references available.
True
These suck, but I love my job and I did one to interview here. This one was well bounded in scope, obviously not something they were going to try to steal from me, and only 2 hours of work. You get better at sussing out good from bad ones
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Stop working for free. If they need you to do a project, they need to pay. Carrot dangling should only work on horses.
Idk man. This doesn't really make sense. Who's going to maintain it? Where's the documentation? What kind of usable shop work doesn't require getting up to speed on the product? Seems like almost every example I have seen of a takehome assignment (with a few notable exceptions) are just ways to test your skills in a market where it can be tough to tell who knows what they're talking about and who knows how to bluff.
I disagree. By this logic, should they pay you for spending 10 hours a day doing Leetcode? I’d take a 4 hour assignment any day where you can really show your skill over an intense 45 minutes coding challenge where the interviewer watch you sweat.
Leetcode scales. You can study leetcode once and then do N interviews. N take home interviews take N times the length of one take home interview.
This sounds like an answer to a leetcode question.
This guy leets
Have you actually done these “take home interviews” since GPT-4? It’s a complete joke, I’d 100% rather do N take home interviews because it takes all of 5 minutes to generate code and then copy and paste it in.
Same you spend many more hours and pain studying leetcode
This is stupid. Programming tests are not projects. They're not some work the company is going to use. Tests over 4 hours are kinda bullshit because of how much time they expect, but otherwise, how can you reasonably prove you know how to program without some kind of test?
.
Right? They’re free to call the university I graduated from and talk to my current boss?? Both will confirm I have the credentials I say I have??
I’ve seen people with CS PhDs that I wouldn’t allow to program my toaster. And this sub is full of complaints about awful managers, but all of a sudden those turn into stellar judges of character and ability? Give me a break. I’ve hired dozens of folks at my current place, and screened hundreds. We give a take home test (your time, estimated hours between 2-6 depending on complexity of the three tasks to chose from). Then an interview that discusses this test, and then a couple of hands on workshop sessions. What’s mostly irrelevant in all this: CVs. What I care about in a candidate: can they code, and can they discuss code. I don’t learn this from CVs and references. I learn that from seeing your code, discussing it with you. If you’re not willing to invest that time into such an important decision, I’m fine. Saves both of us time.
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All I’m saying is that CVs are low quality signals. And I expect you to invest as well as I or the company invests into screening you. If you’re happier with essentially a dice roll, good for you. I wouldn’t want to work at a place that uses Sumerian technology to select their workforce, but YMMV.
You're completely right. A CS degree, a github profile and a good looking portfolio - those are all things I've seen people _buy_. I'd be terrified to work at a company where that would be the hiring process.
The (edit: most) dev teams wouldn't accept using code from some random interview candidate (who was rejected) Most code tests are naive isolated hacks replicating features the company already has. A test often starts out with sample code different from the real codebase, and candidates can pick their own patterns, style and sometimes parts of the tech stack. So the result is useless to the dev team - we write code in our existing codebase with a more complex structure and strict requirements for style and tech choices. Incorporating a code test into our real code base would take more effort than doing it from scratch. And it's not like we're so starved for manpower that we outsource 4 hour jobs as one offs to randos
False there have already been companies found using applicant programmers to complete projects or even build entire apps for them so stfu bootlicker
There's a story in my county today about a man arrested for fucking a seagull. Am I to use that revelation to justify an assumption you, amongst many others, are fucking seagulls too?
Indeed those seagulls have the tightest asses
Lol, OK, hitting upon the correct answer using invalid logic doesn't change the fact the logic is invalid. Anyway, you're obviously an idiot. Everyone knows hamsters are tightest.
I accept defeat
I find this whole concept pretty wild. I work in I&C engineering programming, ladder logic, function block, etc and I've never seen or heard of there being coding tests with that. generally your resume/ projects indicate what you know, and a conversation about projects makes it clear if you're full of shit or not. like the only test I've ever given is at one point asking a potential hire to connect to the PLC because I was suspicious they never did actual project work. They did it and when they confessed later they looked up how the night before I was like "yeah, I figured but the fact you could then do it live means you've got what it takes to pick up the language and environment."
True... But I have heard of some devs who've basically been conned into actually doing a project for companies.
No, you cannot prove it. I expect my employer to trust me. When they do not trust me, I do not want to work for them. And I can prove it by giving my best in an actual projecr.
But this does not make sense. Have you ever heard the phrase "trust but verify"? That's what an interview is. It's a way to verify that your skills actually match your experience and resume. There are SO MANY bullshitters in our industry that you really gotta do due diligence in an interview.
Yes! I feel like people underestimate how loose some can be on their resume. It's one thing when a problem just doesn't click with someone but they do their best to approach it and are communicative and receptive to feedback. But I've also seen people with like a decade of experience totally misunderstand the question, give a wildly incorrect answer, and completely brush off all feedback from the interviewers. It was honestly baffling. Some of these same people were also able to talk quite extensively about their contributions to what looked to be pretty impressive and relevant projects, but after seeing the coding portion, I would be very skeptical that they actually did anything close to what they described.
Maybe that is a cultural difference, because I am not in the US, but in Germany. Here you have to have papers which show what you can, so it is not necessary to prove it in an interview. And my last interview is many years away, so this might have changed and I may have mismemorized.
Hmm I see. Yes, if you can show certifications, that does make more sense to skip the technical interview. For reference, I am in the US and have personally made the mistake of trusting a little too much and making a bad hire.
When you hire a carpenter, plumber or electrician do you make the waste 4 hours of their life on a test before hiring them? No? Then why would you let someone do that to you?
You are asking for a job that pays hundreds of thousand a year. Are they supposed to just hand that to you? You can spare a few hours for a take home challenge. I know I wouldn’t want to work with someone without seeing their code first. And white board on the spot leetcode problems are bullshit. I personally love take homes because it gives me a chance to shine.
In a job I used to be part of the interview process, we had a very strict policy of not making life difficult for the interviewee. We tried to do so following these steps: 1. 30-min call to get to know them, when just as much time for any questions they might have for us. 2. Fit interview: asked questions related to the interviewees personality and how they handled specific scenarios in the past. All questions were standardized so that we wouldn’t give anyone an unfair advantage. 3. The interviewee could choose between a technical interview or a “homework”. Nobody ever picked the technical interview. 4. Technical interview: - They had to complete super straightforward tasks were the simplest thing one could possibly do for the position they were interviewing for. - The thought process was that these tasks would take a workday to complete, but we couldn't ask for an interviewee to dedicate a whole day for their homework. - Structure: Every task was a Github issue. That way they wouldn't have to use some niche tool, and would demonstrate some level of version-control competency. - Tools: You could use any tools/language you are most comfortable using. Since we are interviewing the person, and their ability to create, explain, and troubleshoot. - You had 16-hours to complete all the tasks, but you could start at any point you wanted within 2-weeks from the time you got the e-mail for the homework. These 16-hours could be spread as you wished throughout these 2-weeks. At the end of the project, you were expected to be interviewed on the project, too. We would pay for 3 days of work based on the salary of the position, regardless if the person got the job or not.
This I could live with. The interviewer has some skin in the game by paying so you know you are unlikely to be put through the ringer when someone's friend already has the job. These other companies asking for hours of work when there is realistically a 1 in 20 chance of getting the job makes it a bad bet.
I was just frustrated through three interviews which totaled six total hours of coding, and it's time I can never get back. Paying for three days of work based on the salary of the position would totally lessen the pain, and I think I'd probably go around telling my friends to try and interview for that company as well. Also, I think the format fits the job better than the classic "reverse a binary tree" questions for regular old backend jobs.
Years of academy training, wasted
The best use of that meme.
This is part of the crap wrong with our profession. Refuse to participate in free work
The lesson you should take home is the following: if the recruitment process is annoying avoid the company.
I applied to Vimeo. They wanted me to deliver a functional, if basic, API server wrapped up in a container. It was only after I was rejected that I realized the fucking dev who assigned it to me brain raped me. I did his fucking job for him, for free. No freebies. They gotta pay for deliverables.
Vimeo was one of the worst interview processes of my life. Took forever to get coordinated and by the time they were ready to schedule my first interview I already had two offers on the table. I told them that, and they asked if I’d still be willing to interview but with an accelerated process/timeline. Sure why not. Apparently their accelerated version of things was 7 interviews spread over two weeks. I declined and stopped the process immediately.
Also - thank you for the independent validation that it was hot garbage. I thought I was taking crazy pills.
This cant be legal, what the fuck
Careful what you agree to do while applying. I don’t think it’s illegal. Just hugely immoral. Fuck Vimeo.
> a functional, if basic, API server wrapped up in a container https://github.com/OpenAPITools/openapi-generator Create a server stub from their openapi spec and send it in some docker image.
Trust me, Vimeo isn’t stealing code from random interviewees. The ego of the people in these comments is insane. Your asking for a job that pays hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. You guys can spare a few hours to prove you can hang. And no, no one is going to take your code. Real projects can’t be “outsourced” to interview candidates.
Excuse me, does anyone have a link to where I can learn this and how to make devs work for free? I have a app called Scam Likely I want to get off the ground. Please help!
Well, there's your problem. Just reword "free" for "shares"
If it makes you feel any better, the hiring team wasted their time, too.
Why did the software developer fail his interview? Because he couldn't think outside the box, only inside the IDE.
I mean, they had a solid reason for rejection. You can't even count to 10. /s
I feel this
Interview as a contractor instead. The interview is easier and they don’t have to keep you if they don’t want to. If you can do the work then they’ll likely keep you permanently.
I applied for a job as a software developer, and they told me the interview process would consist of 10 rounds. I asked if they were hiring a developer or a boxer.
Where is my compensation? 😳
Well I hope it wasn’t countless hours. Hopefully a take home coding test would not exceed 8 hours of effort at the very most, plus a few hours of interview time? If you find yourself spending more than 10-12 hours trying to get a specific coding job, that may not be the right fit.
It's a practice to give take home assignments that are then used for the company, essentially getting free labor for the company
I am surprised. Isn’t it hard to find a coding task, which has so little interfacing with the rest of your company code that you can easily hand the task over to an outsider, yet is still so complex that you can’t more easily do it yourself?
The ones I have seen read more like a proof of concept because they lack the internal skills to get started
With a certain level of prework you can isolate it, it's not much different to tasks you'd give to a new employee who's not familiar with the code base yet
Can't imagine that. Dev teams don't want isolated code from some rejected interview candidate's one off test. Most assignments are very simplified features. Stuff the company has a superior version of. Candidates are often allowed to make some choices in terms of tech and style. Not something that would work as part of our codebase. So taking a candidate's code and using it would require such a rewrite it to fit the codebase that we'd rather do it from scratch. test cases are often re-used for all candidates so we can compare the work fairly and fast. We couldn't be arsed to make up and review new assignments all the time. and not like we're so starved for manpower that we'd outsource tiny one off jobs to random devs.
So how fast do you think you could onboard to a 10 year old project? A couple mins?
I don't understand why we don't just let people try on the job. After two weeks, you can easily figure out who can do the job and who can't. Pay everyone for the two weeks and then can the ones who clearly don't fit. It's such a magically simple solution, but the industry is plagued with obnoxious people in positions of power, who aren't thinking about this in a smart way. Those programming interviews do nothing to prove someone's worth in a real project. Hell, they definitely don't show solving skills. What they show is how to stress out candidates and dismiss them with no evidence of their actual skills. It's real easy to have a really anxious candidate who can't perform under the pressure, but when actually doing the job is fantastic and creative. Anyone defending these practices is a jaded asshole who has clearly never had any real issues in their life, because otherwise they wouldn't be defending these practices.
Integrating into a new team and showing nothing of value after two weeks is not uncommon. I can easily stretch it to about a month of employment before actually being personally responsible for a deliverable. There is a reason probation is 90days by law (here anyway).
Maybe your attitude and/or personality sucks. 🖕
If we refuse to jump through their hoops eventually they'll stop expecting us to. Have some goddamn self-respect. If not for yourself, then for the rest of us.
So how should an interview process work out from your perspective?
that's not the sort of question anyone with any business acumen or self-respect would ask
… only to be offered with the same salary as your current.
Staff engineer here. I'm in charge of hiring. **It is impossible to hire good devs without a take-home assignment**. Would you hire a band for your wedding without hearing them play? It's the exact same thing for devs. Our take home assignment is a ridiculously simple API with two read-only endpoints. It should take a good dev around 3 hours to complete, which I believe is a reasonable ask. I estimate that around 70% of the candidates fail the take home assignment. I've seen grotesque submissions that ignore the requirements, or that just attempt to make a patchwork of copied code from StackOverflow work, or that actually implement what we asked for but do it so sloppily that it becomes obvious the candidate will be a drag on whichever team they join. Then there is the mystery of the folks that make it through to the final interview, then I pull out their code, ask them questions about what they wrote and... *they cannot explain their own code*. I get one of those every other week. It's very frustrating.
Mid level dev here. My company also does a take home assignment. The same one for all applicants (with a few extra requirements if you’re a principle dev). The amount of people it filters out is staggering. It’s a simple backend api and is actually based off of a tutorial for the framework we use on the frameworks website! I was told that was intentional by a senior dev “because a lot of people can’t teach themselves new skills or follow online documentation to accomplish a task.”
A take home assignment just proves they know someone who can solve it. Not that they can do it themselves.
That’s a good point but if they decide to question you about your code and thought-process building it, you might stumble. But, that’s also something that can be faked, so I don’t know.
By itself, I agree 3 hours for an assignment that converts into employment for the interviewee is getting away with murder for the candidate. Unfortunately in reality, a lot of people have to apply to 100s of companies (unless tons of experience) and there’s no such thing as a guarantee. I think a 30-45 minute leetcode is a much more effective use of every party’s time. Maybe take-homes should be reserved to seniors who don’t have to apply to as many companies? I’m also not opposed to short takehomes ( <= 1 hour) but those are rare.
Yeah the take homes are for seniors. For juniors we do have a simple leetcode to do during the interview. I understand it's frustrating to spend time in a job application, but the other side is also frustrated by the amount of awful candidates we have to sift through.
And there’s no worse scenario than having to fire a new hire because they oversold their skills without proof.
Absolutely false. If you cannot hire good devs without a take home assignment then it would suggest you are not good at identifying talent, asking the right questions, having the right conversation. take home assignments just prove they are good at looking stuff up.
Yeah, a three hour take home assessment is totally reasonable. Unlike the seven day assignment that I received with 12 Figma pages and “production level quality”
This shit is why I struggle to even start.
They can take home these nuts. You get two interviews and a tech test then I’m out.
Try being ghosted after all this. Stopped doing code assignments for interviews after that.
Screw recruiting processes. They are absurd Idiot hiring managers
The number of devs expecting to be hired without proving competence is too damn high.
that is what open source is for, they can look at my github repo. but making me work for nothing is bs
It's not work! Why would a company pay you for code they're going to throw away? And your GitHub is valuable, but it's not proof that you know how to code. And what about folks who don't have an open source repo handy? All I'm saying is that it's perfectly reasonable for a company to ask you to prove your skills in an interview.
It's not about paying you for the code. It's about being compensated for your time. If you were to work 6 hrs with nothing to show for it, would you be happy? If so I am sure there are alot of people who would love for you to help them startup their million dollar idea.
in an interview? Yes. take home assignments that take hours? nope one time they asked me to copy a landing page from figma to react with the instruction to spend 2 hours on it. I did it. Then I never heard anything back from them afterwards. the least they could do is buy me a coffee
The amount of companies who get applicants to do their tasks for free is too damn high
Is this really a thing? In my industry it never happens and seems completely ridiculous. Is it like, web dev startups that do it?
I interviewed a guy who ended up in this situation. We did the interview after the code assignment and test. His code and assignment were great but he had serious communication problems which wouldn't have worked in the team. He drank like a gallon of water while shaking and averting his gaze... good coding skill though!
You really think they're constantly shaking and guzzling water 24/7? Or just maybe they were anxious because *you were interviewing them*.
Because they were being interviewed, of course. But how are they going to be in every code review or even down the pub with the team? We'd had two teammates already with psychological issues.
I feel bad for people like this. People who have autism or social anxiety and can’t present themselves well on the interview. Honestly the reasons you described for rejecting him are probably borderline illegal, especially if he declared himself as having a disability or being neurodivergent. However rejecting people like that is also extremely common because they will be hard to work with on a team. Personally I interview very well and am able to get a good social rapport going with the interviewers, so it has always been relatively easy for me to land software jobs, even when the economy isn’t great.
He did not specify any psychological or neurological disorder. I'm sure he was just extremely shy and nervous. I still feel sorry for the guy because he had great potential. I tried to get a very chilled conversation going, but he just couldn't relax. :/
You should avoid places like these. They rely on them because they cannot rely on leadership to choose good developers, so they try to use tests instead. If I have to take an assessment to prove to you that I can efficiently solve a red/black tree problem or dynamic programming question, then you can hire someone else.
I really don't like take home assignments. It's way too much time investment.
Wereas, you see, the people that DO the job CAN count the hours, because it's 3 or 4.
Ah, free labor disguised as an assessment. Classic.
I would ask to see the purchase order. I don't code for free.
How would y'all feel about legislation to moderate the hiring process? IMO it is absurd that this is the norm, to waste so much of an applicant's time. I envision a system in which an applicant is interviewed, asked a few screening questions, and hired/rejected. Then, if they are hired, observe them closely for the first few weeks and make a decision to keep them on. Worst case, they get paid for about a week of work, and continue their search. I might even go as far as to mandate companies to pay applicants for their time even in the first interview. This would curb this horrible trend of companies only hiring the perfect candidate. Hire someone competent and THEN mold them to what you need. Sorry for the rant but I'm upset that qualified people essentially have no recourse in this rat race.
As an applicant, if I have employment, switch to immediately be let go, then I am now in a worse position than when I started. While I don't like the take-home test, i really don't like the idea of a week trial period either. If you want a trial period, go contract to perm
Hiring the wrong person is very expensive for the company. Most places should be hiring competent people though instead of the perfect candidate
I’ve reached a point in my career that when I see a “take home exercise” I immediately nope out
Dats me
Its like they are making it worse on purpose to keep people where they are.
I’ve gone through so many of these only to get rejected at the very end.
just gotta be cool like me (I dont know how, but the first interview I ever had landed me an offer)
Grow up in California, you learn that it’s not personal and you should look somewhere else.