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Company I interviewed at gave me a 6 hour takehome Do I: 1) Tell the recruiter to thank them for their time but I'm not willing to work for a company that's so disrespectful of my time 2) Tell them myself 3) Ghost them
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Jan 25, 2021 14:15
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1 or 2 If they don't know it's onerous they'll never rethink their process
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Jan 25, 2021 14:18
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Blinkz0rz posted:1 or 2 
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Jan 25, 2021 14:23
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ChickenWing posted:Company I interviewed at gave me a 6 hour takehome 3 If they're dull enough to create such an onerous process, they don't deserve your feedback
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Jan 25, 2021 15:40
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ChickenWing posted:Company I interviewed at gave me a 6 hour takehome 4) Ask if you can invoice them for time spent on the takehome.
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Jan 25, 2021 16:30
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I pulled the “sure I’ll do a 4-hour assignment, if you pay me” thing on a company once and boy were they unhappy.
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Jan 25, 2021 20:56
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ChickenWing posted:Company I interviewed at gave me a 6 hour takehome I once went through application -> 2x phone interviews -> 6 hour mini-project -> 2x in-person interviews for a position that was supposedly open for people of all experience/skill levels (I've got a masters and 4 years) only for them to decide I did not have the technical depth they were looking for. Last I checked they were still looking. Never again.
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Jan 25, 2021 21:24
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I want a quick sanity check before I torpedo myself:quote:The idea is to create a CRUD Web application that lists some items and allows to create, delete and update them. “Items” could be pretty much everything, what you like (we have no preference here): you can take books as items or events (concerts, ...) or just persons (like a registry of persons with ability to create new entries and modify their data). Add the possibility to filter the list and search for items. 6 hours was long because I got into the weeds on some dumb testing details but it is the requirements and not I that is dumb, right?
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Jan 25, 2021 21:33
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I don't think 6 hours to check everything off that list of requirements is an unreasonable timeline. That's probably what it would take me when you factor in full unit testing and everything. Now, the level of effort asked of a prospective employee here on the other hand...
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Jan 25, 2021 21:39
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imo that's a crazy amount to ask of an interviewee. what that tells me is they don't have anyone on their interview panel who can see through bullshitters who say they have done those things.
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Jan 25, 2021 21:48
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Clanpot Shake posted:imo that's a crazy amount to ask of an interviewee. what that tells me is they don't have anyone on their interview panel who can see through bullshitters who say they have done those things. Fwiw, I feel like most 45 minute code interviews are only measuring how well you can do 45 minute code interview problems. I stopped interviewing candidates for Android skills when I realized that there was no good way for me to dig deeply into what they knew to know whether they really knew their stuff, because both the breadth and depth can be very deep, and it's extremely easy to bullshit your way through interviews by talking about how they used frameworks x y & z and never actually had to use the com.android.foo package directly. Volmarias fucked around with this message at 21:57 on Jan 25, 2021 |
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Jan 25, 2021 21:55
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When I interview people I like to get them to bring along some code they wrote and talk me through it/answer my questions about it. Part of the reason I do this is because I didn't go to computer toucher school and I don't know how to do algorithms, but so far I haven't really had any misfires, everyone has netted out to have roughly the skill level that I pegged them at from seeing their code and hearing them talk about it.
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Jan 25, 2021 22:42
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prom candy posted:When I interview people I like to get them to bring along some code they wrote and talk me through it/answer my questions about it. Part of the reason I do this is because I didn't go to computer toucher school and I don't know how to do algorithms, but so far I haven't really had any misfires, everyone has netted out to have roughly the skill level that I pegged them at from seeing their code and hearing them talk about it. I once had a candidate volunteer to show us some of his code in his interview. He even brought his own laptop! The code and the laptop were property of his current company. When we asked him if he was violating NDA he said "Yes, for sure. You know...I think I could get in trouble for showing this to people outside my org." 
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Jan 25, 2021 22:51
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prom candy posted:When I interview people I like to get them to bring along some code they wrote and talk me through it/answer my questions about it. Part of the reason I do this is because I didn't go to computer toucher school and I don't know how to do algorithms, but so far I haven't really had any misfires, everyone has netted out to have roughly the skill level that I pegged them at from seeing their code and hearing them talk about it. What do you do for the people who don't code as hobby and can't show your their code from work? Edit: and now interview chat is happening in three different threads today 
Jose Valasquez fucked around with this message at 22:56 on Jan 25, 2021 |
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Jan 25, 2021 22:52
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Jose Valasquez posted:What do you do for the people who don't code as hobby and can't show your their code from work? Exactly this, I don't have the free time to code outside work, do you ask me to just bring a copy of FizzBuzzEE?
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Jan 26, 2021 01:18
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“Write the most boring app ever” is certainly a type of interview question that apparently exists. Oh, the fun of writing unit tests for a Java CRUD controller.
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Jan 26, 2021 03:48
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Jose Valasquez posted:What do you do for the people who don't code as hobby and can't show your their code from work? I would usually offer a quick take-home assignment instead but most people are able to dig up some code they can talk about when the alternative is homework. I only work for small companies so I don't do a ton of interviewing, if I did I would probably refine the process better.
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Jan 26, 2021 04:43
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I've never had any sort of personal projects so I guess it's homework for me!
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Jan 26, 2021 05:19
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During my last job hunt phase I actually didn't mind spending a night on a take-home if I had already done at least one interview directly with the org and got good vibes. If the take home is directly out the gate before even the first interview then it's an immediate "no thanks". I once had a recruiter send me through tests to complete for three different roles before I'd talked to anyone at the corresponding orgs... that's a hard pass and straight to the poo poo list. I feel a little bit less hostile towards take home projects then I used to after I was hired into my current role. The tech lead mentioned he found the image of Owen Wilson I hid in an extra bonus feature of the solution and that tipped me over the scales to get his recommendation.
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Jan 26, 2021 08:18
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ChickenWing posted:I want a quick sanity check before I torpedo myself: Send back an invite to a full day of requirements gathering to understand the storage, lifetime, uptime, responsiveness etc requirements of the project. “Add the ability to search for items” is impossible to implement effectively without this! Seriously though that project would take me more than 6 hours.
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Jan 26, 2021 11:54
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Asking you to implement something with vague specs and being judged on how well you guess what they meant is pretty realistic to be honest.
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Jan 26, 2021 13:36
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Pile Of Garbage posted:4) Ask if you can invoice them for time spent on the takehome. This is by far the best suggestion, and I cannot wait to try it out.
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Jan 26, 2021 14:21
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downout posted:This is by far the best suggestion, and I cannot wait to try it out. When we were interviewing people for coding positions some of the management insisted on garbage code tests (they were 75% trivia about stuff like the order of arguments in random standard library functions that you can google in 5 seconds) so I insisted that we pay people to take them. Candidates telling me how bad the test was in the interview was a decent indicator of if they had ever coded anything.
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Jan 26, 2021 15:48
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Okay thanks I feel better now. Hypothetically, what would your optimal interview processes look like? I'm still not sure what a good flow looks like that isn't overly onerous on an applicant but still susses out whether or not they've been padding their resumé. Our company does a 30m phone screen -> 2-3h takehome -> 1h in person tech interview -> 1h in person design interview and that even feels heavy, except that each step checks a particular box (takehome: can you augment an application using our stack // tech interview: can you reason about code // design interview: can you look at the big picture). The only thing I'd consider removing is the tech interview, except that there's some stuff that's hard to identify without being in person
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Jan 26, 2021 16:36
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Do you care about whether the applicant is padding their resume, or just about whether they can do the job you're interviewing them for? There are different processes to find out those two things.
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Jan 26, 2021 16:55
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A few years back I did some research on interviewing for my then-boss. It was pretty dire. You'd almost might as well flip a coin. (Un)conscious bias and over/underperforming on interviews vs work tasks are the two biggest sources of inaccuracy. From memory the list from best to worst assessment was: Actual work. tryout periods. Converting contractors. Direct* referrals. *Direct = worked with this person in a similar job. Indirect "my brother in law does that" are much less helpful. Assessments. If! - They actually match the task - don't become their own game Many do not match the work or become their own mini skillset (leetcode). Panel interviews with the team. Not like 5:1 but more like 2:1 and very important to use the same questions for each candidate. Individual interviews with the team. Again better with consistent questions. Individual Interview with the boss. As you can see, the better methods are harder and more resource intensive. So you have to weigh cost and benefit.
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Jan 26, 2021 17:03
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I think we as an industry badly overestimate the value of hiring "good programmers." in practice, most of what makes a programmer good is communication skills, and most of how we interview technical people doesn't measure that effectively.
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Jan 26, 2021 17:09
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Any attempt to gauge whether candidates know their poo poo is gonna be dubious at best, and honestly focusing on the less important things anyway. Just talk to them, as a starting point. Can they reason about the sort of stuff they'll be doing? Do they seem at all interested in the work (not like "if you're interviewing for coders at the paperclip company they gotta be passionate about paperclips", I mean the actual work they'll be doing)? If they're not gonna be fully remote, do they seem like someone who'll be all right to be around for their colleagues (obviously this one is hard because of personal biases and such that you need to carefully account for)? Demanding people spend their free time doing the thing they do for work is bullshit no matter how you do it. You might end up hiring someone who doesn't work out and having to let them go after a short time, but that risk is always gonna be there anyway. And it's not like it's in most prospective employees' interest to lie their way into a job they'll lose anyway. Note: I've never interviewed from this side of the table, so I probably have no idea what I'm talking about.
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Jan 26, 2021 17:27
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ultrafilter posted:Do you care about whether the applicant is padding their resume, or just about whether they can do the job you're interviewing them for? There are different processes to find out those two things. I mean we only ask them about the points on their resume that directly pertain to the job they'll be doing, it can't be that much different. I don't care that you lied about having 15 years of JS experience so long as you didn't lie about being able write a python script and containerize it without having to first google "how install docker"
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Jan 26, 2021 17:55
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ChickenWing posted:I mean we only ask them about the points on their resume that directly pertain to the job they'll be doing, it can't be that much different. I don't care that you lied about having 15 years of JS experience so long as you didn't lie about being able write a python script and containerize it without having to first google "how install docker" So a few years back my consulting team was trying to get docker to work on the corp MS machines and it was hell. A lot of try/fail and googling. The no-nothing bully director heard some version of "the expensive consultants are googling problems" and decided to make an issue of it on the steering call. As a consultant that stuff really sucks because it's a punchy sound bite that plays into the worst assumptions. Especially with people not familiar with doing the work (out of touch mgmt...) Thankfully the client head architect understood the problem and had the guts to call the guy out for his BS. We actually came away more credible since we were going above and beyond to get it setup versus just throwing up our hands, pointing at the contract and sitting around billing for nothing. Apropos of nothing just nice to remember that version of the story with a happy ending.
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Jan 26, 2021 18:41
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Truman Peyote posted:I think we as an industry badly overestimate the value of hiring "good programmers." in practice, most of what makes a programmer good is communication skills, and most of how we interview technical people doesn't measure that effectively. Woebin posted:Demanding people spend their free time doing the thing they do for work is bullshit no matter how you do it. As someone who's been the interviewer hundreds of times at like 8 different companies, I think you are both absolutely right. I've given up wasting time "assessing" someone's skill. I let their resume speak to that. Especially when hiring for senior roles, I see their time at other companies as time spent vetting their skill, so that I don't have to. Instead I focus on communication skills, flexibility, humility, empathy, or whatever other value my company currently holds.
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Jan 26, 2021 18:49
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I wish our interviewing practice was more like a pair-programming session where you sit down with some mild refactoring task and get to talk about how to redesign something and reasoning behind various choices. I feel like you get a feeling for not only how much coding experience they have on some particular platform, but how they think and how they communicate. But no, all the interview feedback I get from hiring is "beep boop need more algorithmic complexity". I would take someone with the ability to justify using the standard library implementation over the guy that can hand-roll a "clever" algo that will be a buggy maintenance nightmare any day.
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Jan 26, 2021 19:49
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Truman Peyote posted:I think we as an industry badly overestimate the value of hiring "good programmers." in practice, most of what makes a programmer good is communication skills, and most of how we interview technical people doesn't measure that effectively. This is more or less my sentiment. My current company is fairly good about looking at soft skills and aptitude. The take-home coding exercise (which is existing code that you have to fix, not a giant time-sucking project spec) serves first as a means to determine whether a candidate is lying about knowing how to code/plagiarizing (boss said liars/plagiarizers were unfortunately common), and then to gauge poo poo like observation skills and problem solving ability. I feel it’s more aptitude-oriented than making someone write a bunch of code from scratch or implementing algorithms. We had an amazing candidate a while back (that we unfortunately lost to another offer) who was low experience and high aptitude. Like, came in with a Udemy certificate and blew masters degree holders out of the water (well she had a masters too but in a completely unrelated field). Talked us through how she would go about researching a solution when asked about something she didn’t know how to do, uncannily good at asking us questions about problems she was solving to glean extra context, overall excellent communicator, all the soft skills that you can’t teach. Probably would have been weeded out by an interview process that focused on existing hard skills and direct experience. My previous company was really bad about hiring on the basis of existing hard programming skills and ignoring all other qualities. So they got a dour antisocial team lead and then a hot-headed toxic junior dev . All the technical skills between couldn’t overcome the utterly miserable work environment they created.
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Jan 26, 2021 21:08
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Vulture Culture posted:Do you have some kind of matrixed TL/EM model, or does the TL sit informally between you and an EM for the team? Is the TL's manager also your manager? I'm not even willing to try that. It's more of a "if you're the smartest person in the room, find a different room" situation as pretentious as that sounds. I have 2 leads: one on my cross-functional team and one on my code discipline team. And the issue is all the web developers are so siloed, finding opportunities to mentor is impossible and I can really only try and instill good practices to the web developers on my cross-functional team. The people on the other teams are out of my hands. The talent isn't diluted well here, which is also a problem
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Jan 27, 2021 00:17
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You would think hiring off internships would be successful but somehow we screwed that up too. They were so desperate for low level people that they basically hired everyone who said yes. Not even sure they checked with the people the interesting with. Love big companies.
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Jan 27, 2021 02:11
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A lot of problems in development I see as coming from an over inflated sense of importance in what we do. The compensation probably attributes to this as well. The vast vast majority of us work on poo poo that does not matter at all.
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Jan 27, 2021 04:33
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Gildiss posted:A lot of problems in development I see as coming from an over inflated sense of importance in what we do. How dare you talk about my b2b marketing software like this
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Jan 27, 2021 05:13
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Gildiss posted:A lot of problems in development I see as coming from an over inflated sense of importance in what we do. Shhhh! A few more years of this bullshit and I'll have a house paid off and a solid college fund for my kid. Don't rock the boat, lets just ride it out. 
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Jan 27, 2021 06:28
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Gildiss posted:A lot of problems in development I see as coming from an over inflated sense of importance in what we do. For my entire career, I've had to grapple with the simultaneous feelings thst I'm both overpaid and underpaid.
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Jan 27, 2021 06:38
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Gildiss posted:A lot of problems in development I see as coming from an over inflated sense of importance in what we do. I do important things, great things.
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Jan 27, 2021 08:22
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