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Blinkz0rz posted:I think you're right in principle, but coming from the hiring side it's tough to justify a first round of 3+ interview hours, a second round of another 3+ interview hours and 6 hours of pairing. That's 12 hours of lost productivity at a minimum, not to mention 12+ hours of billable labor that the company eats. I'd get up and walk out well before spending 12 hours in an interview. I realize that may be the norm in Silicon Valley but it wouldn't fly here. Reminds me of the time a company wanted to hire me to build a NodeJS app that did a certain thing and then gave me interview "homework" that was basically "build this thing." I politely declined. I'm all for doing a small paid contract to demonstrate my skills but gently caress devoting 1+ days to doing 'free' work.
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May 22, 2014 12:23
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I've sat in on a number of interviews and I find the conversational style works best. I can always suss out a persons's skills just from talking with them a few minutes. I remember costing a guy a job once because he was getting grilled and handling it really well, but then he mentioned that he was a Git expert and taught 'classes' to his team so I asked him what 'git stash' did and he had no clue. Obviously it's kind of an obscure feature, but if you call yourself an expert you really need to know what that command does. Overall I think it matters more that the interviewers are competent at interviewing rather than the style. Also I get why Silicon Valley interviews are so thorough, a entry-level development job out there pays roughly what a C-level exec job pays here, so it makes sense if you're paying someone that much money that you spend a lot of time getting to know them and their skillset.
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May 22, 2014 19:37
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I've done "homework" in the past, gotten the job, and regretted it. Had I taken the "homework" as a red flag I would have been better off. With that said, I certainly see no issue with giving candidates problems to solve and even a little bit of light take-home work is acceptable. I think employers do need to exercise discretion with it though. The job market is stacked way against employers right now and they really don't want to be scaring qualified candidates off. Personally I think it's best to keep interviews under four hours total (including phone screens) and have any logic challenges take place at the interview rather than "homework." You should really be able to make an informed hiring decision for any job that pays less than six figures in under four hours.
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May 23, 2014 13:21
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hirvox posted:If the "homework" in question was real work from their backlog, it might imply that the company expects that the people who do get hired do other unpaid work as well. Yeah it would. I don't think this is a common thing however. I think companies just want to assess a candidate's skills and some of them simply aren't good at doing that. So they give out a "homework" exercise to evaluate the candidate. Now there are several problems with this approach. The first of which it alienates a portion of your potential hiring pool. It's hard to pin down a percentage but it's safe to say that it will turn away a certain amount of qualified candidates. This problem is compounded by the fact that talented individuals may be turned away by this but desperate jobseekers will not. Furthermore, it shows that a company does not value a candidate's time and does not consider them a professional. This is kind of quixotic because these are the qualities that a hiring manager should be looking for. Again, there's nothing wrong with grilling a candidate, nothing wrong with sitting them at a whiteboard or laptop, or pair programming. It's just that when the interview process bleeds into what could reasonably be considered "billable hours," it causes more harm that good. I think that if a company really wants to give out "homework" then they need to also pay the candidate for their work.
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May 24, 2014 19:44
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Sometimes sleeping in and playing video games for a while is worth it.
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May 27, 2014 14:05
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