Preferences

One note that might be good to highlight in the article is that the take-home is expected to be 2 hours long. From my experience, they are much longer so I was initially surprised to see take-home's being given before an initial call until I looked at the assignment itself.

I still consider this a red flag. The company wants me to put time into the hiring process, but they can’t be bothered to do the same.

If there is at least a recruiter screening first, I’ll apply and ask about “Bring Your Own Code Examples”, mostly when their daily work would use tools that I have some code published.

> I still consider this a red flag. The company wants me to put time into the hiring process, but they can’t be bothered to do the same.

Exactly this.

It costs a company nothing to give you a take-home, but it will cost you (the candidate) potentially many hours. On my last job search, I got burned a number of times where I'd work for hours on a take-home only to get ghosted. I don't think they even looked at my solution.

Now I have a personal policy where I will refuse to do a take-home unless the interviewer sits there with me while I do it. This demonstrates to me that the interviewer is actually serious and respectful of my time.

Another thing problematic about take-home projects: They don't scale for the candidate. Sure, 2 hours is nothing if you want a job, but typically the candidate is going to be applying for dozens, if not hundreds of jobs. Even 20 take-homes just like this is now 40 hours of work--just to get through a hiring gate!

It is not "respectful of the candidate's time" if everyone is doing it.

It CAN cost nothing to give a take home, but this is not a requirement. At my previous employer any candidate that made it as far as the take home project was paid for the time they worked on it.
That’s a good distinction. A paid take home is very different than an unpaid one.
> but they can’t be bothered to do the same

They will need to review your submission, which absolutely does take time.

> They will need to review your submission, which absolutely does take tim

But that's the kicker: they won't review your submission!

I'm sure the AI will do that.
Who do you think will write the submission code?
I can see both perspectives. If you are a skilled hiree, this seems like a waste of time. But if you are hiring online, you will inevitably get a lot of terrible candidates and you need to filter them out. If you are a small team, you can't spend weeks interviewing randos with little to none coding experience for a SE role. The problem is that online hiring is full of noise, but both sides suffer from the expenses this creates.
Click the link of the take home and tell me if you expect it to take you more than 20 minutes. I don’t understand the resections here

This item has no comments currently.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Story Lists

j
Next story
k
Previous story
Shift+j
Last story
Shift+k
First story
o Enter
Go to story URL
c
Go to comments
u
Go to author

Navigation

Shift+t
Go to top stories
Shift+n
Go to new stories
Shift+b
Go to best stories
Shift+a
Go to Ask HN
Shift+s
Go to Show HN

Miscellaneous

?
Show this modal