
Don’t do the long take home assignments like coinbase - minimaxir
https://reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/7rdogv/dont_do_the_long_take_home_assignments_like/
======
azinman2
I really disagree with this. Yes it’s crappy if you put in many hours and
don’t get the job. Interviewing sucks for everyone. But having been on both
sides of this equation (hiring and being hired), I believe the take home is
the best chance to evaluate someone. They’re able to work without the pressure
of someone staring at them and clock ticking, given google and all their
normal ways of working, and something long enough to be able to more
realisticly assess them.

It’s amazing what a short assignment can tell you about a person, and it makes
the follow up on site productive because there are so many ways to ask about
their work.

Personally for Apple I asked specifically to be given one of these instead of
the whiteboard, as I get overly stressed in a “pop quiz” type setup. They
still ended up pop quizzing me twice, and one of them I didn’t do well on. It
was my take home that pushed me over the edge and got me hired.

~~~
pawelkomarnicki
That's bullshit. When I was hiring I needed a Skype/Phone call, and 1 hour of
on-site or just another more technical call/interview (1-2 hours max if it
goes really well). Hired 3 great folks and 1 that decided it's not a job for
him, because he found it boring after all.

I never take the "a couple hours long assignments" because the scope is never
"a couple hours", once company wanted me to build a chat service that would
take at least 20 hours of work to get properly done with testing, etc.

~~~
FireBeyond
Absolutely.

I'm talking one that I recall that asked for parsing Apache logs from a
stream, displaying moving averages for most popular URLs, aggregates of
visitor counts, having high water mark "alerts" for ingress traffic and
monitoring rolling averages to "de-alert" when traffic dropped below that,
including of course unit tests and documentation...

One, that's more than a couple of hours. And two, that sounds awfully like
something you're planning to use, whether I'm hired or not...

------
kfcm
Here's food for thought.

Does this happen with experienced positions open in other departments?

Are experienced CPAs interviewing for the new position in Accounting required
to balance an example set of books?

Are experienced Sales interviewees expected to go out and sell a sample
product before being hired?

A lawyer for Legal expected to write a sample brief or appear before the court
in a sample trial?

HR expected to do sample HR things?

Think about it.

~~~
kemitche
I won't say I agree with most interview processes for software, but here's
more food for thought:

CPAs presumably have been externally certified, so perhaps you only need to
check "team fit" things.

Sales interviews: if you can't sell me on yourself, why would I hire you? The
interview is enough.

Lawyers I would assume have some number of public items for me to look at.

Software engineers: none of that applies. If they've contributed to open
source, maybe you can look at that, but many of the great engineers I've
worked with have not.

~~~
timr
You're making an assumption that the tech screening process actually screens
people on a criterion that matters. But nobody measures the false-negative
rate, so they have no idea.

I've now worked at places that did CTCI interviews and "traditional"
interviews, and I've noticed no difference in overall quality amongst the
employees. I've known plenty of idiots who work at big, famous tech companies,
and plenty of amazing people who never ran the whiteboard gauntlet at
GooAmaFaceSoft.

My opinion has evolved: tech interviews are the result of generations of
cargo-culting amongst a group of people who copied Microsoft, and never really
questioned their assumptions. They're just as random and noisy as any other
kind of interview, but far more arrogant. Spolsky was right that you should do
a FizzBuzz test, but that's it. That's all you need. Everything else should be
about communication, personality and the other intangibles that matter _far
more_ for every job that involves working with other people (which is all of
them).

~~~
_dps
I half-agree, but Spolsky also makes an excellent argument in "Hitting the
High Notes" [0] that there is disproportionate value delivered from
excellence, as opposed to mere competence ("Five Antonio Salieris won’t
produce Mozart’s Requiem. Ever. Not if they work for 100 years.").

FizzBuzz + short work sample + strong communication skills is probably not
that far from optimal if you want to hire lots of people who are competent and
work on problems that they have solved before. Note that I said "optimal" and
not "good"; this is still a noisy process.

But if you're doing something where you need to people to excel beyond what
they've done before, and perhaps beyond what your company has ever done
before, then I think it's naive to think that additional testing for things
like on-the-spot thinking, creativity, and diligence under pressure convey
_no_ useful signal. This, in my opinion, is an extraordinary claim and
requires strong evidence before anyone should take it seriously.

[0] [https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/07/25/hitting-the-
high-n...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/07/25/hitting-the-high-notes/)

~~~
timr
_" But if you're doing something where you need to people to excel beyond what
they've done before, and perhaps beyond what your company has ever done
before, then I think it's naive to think that additional testing for things
like on-the-spot thinking, creativity, and diligence under pressure convey no
useful signal. This is, in my opinion, an extraordinary claim and requires
strong evidence before anyone should take it seriously."_

The extraordinary claim is that whiteboard testing (or take-home projects,
or...well, anything in the current tech interview) does any of those things.

You can't whiteboard-test for excellence. Excellence is both contextual (i.e.
it depends a lot on your company, team, culture, etc.), and based mostly on
squishy, intangible factors that go beyond "code": picture the brilliant coder
who dons his headphones, falls down a hole, and produces a pile of
undocumented, complex code of zero business value. It's a cliche, but do we
interview for it? No. We ask people to do a graph search on a matrix.

My contention is that we'd do far better with some simple, basic screens for
technical competency, and then spending _most_ of our time on communication
skills, personality, clarity, organization, planning, business sense and team
fit.

...but of course, these are questions with no single correct answer, so
engineers are afraid of them.

~~~
_dps
> The extraordinary claim is that whiteboard testing (or take-home projects,
> or...well, anything in the current tech interview) does any of those things.

This is just a naked assertion. This kind of testing happens in many places
and industries, and many people seem to believe it's useful. Maybe they're all
deluded, but that's precisely why I'm calling it an extraordinary claim.

Do you really think it is obvious, prima facie, that asking people to
demonstrate some skills on their feet, or to do a short sample of work for
you, tells you nothing about their ability to do good work? If so then I
suppose we'll have to agree to disagree.

Edit: I'll add that I personally "interviewed for excellence" as a professor
for many years. There was, as far as I could tell, no doubt among professors
that interviewing was a non-trivially useful part of evaluating a candidate
for graduate school. Again, maybe we were all deluded. But that's a claim that
demands some proof.

~~~
timr
_" This is just a naked assertion. This kind of testing happens in many places
and industries, and many people seem to believe it's useful. Maybe they're all
deluded, but that's precisely why I'm calling it an extraordinary claim."_

Provide evidence that coding interviews does what you want it to do. Saying
that "other people do it, and therefore it must work" is cargo-cult analysis.

I'm trying not to be a jerk here, but I already know the answer: there's no
evidence. People do this stuff for exactly the same reason you're biased
toward doing it -- because someone else with a big name did it, and nobody
goes wrong by doing what Google does!

 _" Do you really think it is obvious, prima facie, that asking people to
demonstrate some skills on their feet, or to do a short sample of work for
you, tells you nothing about their ability to do good work?"_

I think it tells you something about that person's ability to do the skill
you've tested. Sort of. Under extreme pressure.

Does asking people to code on a whiteboard tell you how they're going to work
with their peers, communicate clearly and efficiently, document their code,
focus on business goals, and generally not be an asshole (all of which are far
more important skills for success in a group)? No.

Even as far as coding ability goes, I've many, many "brilliant programmers"
who eat leetcode problems for breakfast but can't be trusted to write clean
code on their own. It's a borderline useless signal.

~~~
_dps
I will fully agree with you that many interview practices are bad and "cargo
cult". I'm just saying that I disagree on where the burden of proof is. The
fact that large fractions of the industry do it and seem to believe that it
has _some_ value is , in my mind, what establishes this belief as the norm —
in distinction to the belief that these practices have zero value, which is
(again in my opinion) an extraordinary claim.

I'm saying "lots of people do it, I can give theoretical arguments for why it
might be useful, and it seems common across industries, and this is the only
industry I've seen that has a meme about it being totally useless ... so I'd
like to see some evidence that it's useless". You're saying "prove that it's
useful". We disagree on which direction bears the burden of proof.

Edit: to provide something a bit more explicit, the kind of thing that I would
consider persuasive here (again just my opinion) would be several companies
that have succeeded like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft but have employed
hiring practices based just on FizzBuzz and communication skill evaluation.

------
s3nnyy
I run coderfit.com, we match programmers with tech jobs in Zurich, Munich and
NYC.

Since a long time I try to educate companies to at least pay a symbolic sum to
the engineer, like 10-20 USD/hour.

The reason companies don't do this is because they think that if the
programmer fails, paying 100 USD for "nothing" is a waste (x). Most don't
value the positive reputation and word of mouth this will generate. They just
assume that if you're rejected they will never meet you again and after all
you "agreed" to do a free homework task, so you are not supposed to be pissed.

(x) Paying recruitment agencies five figures however feels okay because it is
somewhat linked to the success of contributing bringing a new person in.

~~~
Chris2048
> they think that if the programmer fails, paying 100 USD for "nothing" is a
> waste

This angers me, as it suggests the programmer wasting time for nothing is
fine..

~~~
s3nnyy
This is my educated guess why they are not doing this. 100 USD for a company
is like, nothing but you have to get it approved and so on.

Also many companies live in the illusion people are supposed to be excited to
work for them or even worse they think they're Google although most lack the
brandname. They look at how Google hires and think "Google is successful", so
we just copy them, which will make us successfull, too. Well, this is a
guaranteed way to fail because Google can allow themselves to do this due to
Sergey Brin & Larry Page who turned tech into value, which turned into
prestige/brand. This reminds me of PG, who wrote in one of his essays:
"Prestige is just fossilized inspiration. If you do anything well enough,
you'll make it prestigious"

------
throwaway2016a
> No matter what bs the recruiter trys to tell you, take home assignments are
> cheap ways to evaluate and screen out candidates. You spend X hours
> finishing the assignment, they spend 30 minutes or less judging it, pretty
> disrespectful if you ask me.

Or less...

Slightly off topic but a tip to companies that give these tests who might be
reading.

If you must give a technical assessment I'm a fan of giving the candidate unit
tests and asking them to write code that passes.

Then you have a slightly different unit test on your end. Same algorithm but
different input values so they can't just cheat and write code that just
echo's the expected results.

If the unit tests pass the candidate passes. If the unit test partially fails
on a small number of the unknown values it's not an immediate fail for the
candidate. I'll usually look at the code for 10 minutes and see why it failed.

------
tboyd47
Agreed. I did about 4 of those in a few months and got rejected each time,
with no explanation at all. One of these was for a _teaching_ position. Really
a waste of time if you ask me. I learned nothing and wasted many hours. If a
company wants to see what my code looks like, I have many projects available
on GitHub.

The only time I did one of these and actually got accepted, they used it as a
justification for negotiating down my salary. "Your code was about 5 out of 10
on subjective code quality cool points, so we're cutting your offer by
$10,000." Then they cut me loose after 6 months because the project was
"over." This was for a full-time position.

Now, if I get asked to do a take-home assignment, I ask instead if I can pair
program with an engineer for an hour. If not, then I probably won't even
continue because they clearly don't respect their engineers' time.

~~~
dominotw
> I have many projects available on GitHub.

I was told many times that they don't have time to objectively evaluate this
so they don't even look at these. Even the companies that explicitly ask for
this never look at those.

With code submissions they said they can objectively compare cadidates since
they were measured by the same yardstick.

~~~
tboyd47
"They don't have time to objectively evaluate this," to me, sounds like, "Our
engineers follow extremely rigid and obtuse coding standards that have no
relation to the outside world, and are unable to read or understand code
written by anyone outside our company."

On being measured up with other candidates, I'd really rather they assess me
based on my skills and experience, not on a time-unlimited mini-project. The
major factor in those projects is free time. I am always going to lose to a
person with more free time than me, even though I may outmatch them in skills
and experience. And if all they're looking for is someone with a lot of free
time, that's not the sort of job I'm looking for anyway.

------
ajeet_dhaliwal
The state of the interview process in tech shows that unfortunately many
developers are seen as pushovers and weak people by wider society, mostly
importantly by the people hiring. They put up with a lot of crap that others
would say 'uh, no' to. Worse if promoted to middle manager they'll turn around
and whip their own kind hard all in an effort to server the masters.

------
Psilidae
I don't get it? That doesn't sound too bad. A brief interview with candidates,
a short take home project, and then a final interview seems quite reasonable.
There are tons of people applying for jobs, and companies want to make sure
candidates care and are actually capable of programming; how else are they
supposed to gauge someone's abilities? Just ask how merge sort works, then
hand that Rock Star Software Engineer their 100k job?

I like this statement from the replies there: "People here really think a $90k
job is owed to them for getting a piece of paper and meeting a few times and
answering a few questions right."

I don't know how people are getting hung up on 4-6 hours for a task. I won't
even rate any of my software tasks less than 2-4 hours in scrum, because I
know that with planning and/or testing no non-trivial task takes just an hour.

~~~
ghein
4-6 hours for one interview is fine. For 10-30 positions?

When you already have a 60+ hour role and may also have travel+++ ?

When other firms are moving faster to the real meat of the process?

If you assume a freshly graduated engineer with the summer off who is only
applying to your firm, then a 10 hour assignment is reasonable. Heck an unpaid
internship for the summer is fine for both sides.

If you're in a competitive market hiring for reasonably normal positions,
you'll have a bad time.

Firms that are offering unique, incredibly highly compensated, strategic
positions can require substantial effort and investment by candidates. Or
firms where there is so much competition for a few roles that they can be
exceptionally demanding despite low pay and poor conditions.

You need to make an honest assessment of where you really fit to see if your
demands are reasonable.

~~~
smnrchrds
> 4-6 hours for one interview is fine. For 10-30 positions?

Exactly! When time commitment is symmetrical, the companies would only move
forward with candidates they are seriously considering to hire. Because for a
4 hour interview session with a candidate, they have to invest at least 4
hours of their engineers' time. Probably more, as there is typically more than
one interviewer present at a time.

The company may spend only 10 minutes on average to review an assignment. Most
of the submissions are dismissed in the first 5 minutes for something trivial
or subjective. The more interesting ones get more attention, maybe 30 minutes
of the company's time. Suddenly, "interviewing candidates" get cheaper. And as
is the case with supply and demand, decreased price increases consumption.

Before, the company would have invited only 10 candidates for an in-depth
interview for each position. Taking 4 hours of the time of each candidate, 40
hours in total, and spending 40 hours themselves. Now, they can give
assignments to 240 candidates. That would waste about 1000 hours of
candidates' time, while taking the same 40 hours from company time.

If it catches on, for every job, instead of sending 100 resumes, having 20
phone interviews and 5 in-person interviews (arbitrary numbers), you would
have to send the same 100 resumes, get 20 phone interviews and 20 assignments,
plus a couple of in-person interviews. Suddenly the cost of getting jobs
increases multiple times for the candidate, while staying the same for the
company.

This is not good.

------
ben174
Coinbase is the only company that offered me compensation to do their
homework. $100 in BTC. They paid me within a week of me submitting.

I really appreciated it, and I’ve decided to adopt that as a policy in my
future hiring.

~~~
blevinstein
I also recently went through the Coinbase interview process, and was
pleasantly surprised that they offered this compensation for the take-home
interview part.

Overall, a 4-6 hour task, to be completed on your own over a 1-week period,
seems reasonable to me.

------
intralizee
Take home assignments should be illegal. It makes the field unattractive even
if the pay is high. Doing work without any payment and for hours of your own
time. I think it's time that developers realize we're all a bunch of push
overs and maybe should unionize for some standard requirements to keep us all
sane from abuse.

------
autotune
Meh. I enjoy take home assignments because I can add that as a skill to the
resume when done and some are actually pretty fun. Now I doubt I'd do
something like "here's a CloudFormation template with a hundred different
resources, now make it work with another cloud platform," but something like
"build a few docker containers running nginx through docker compose, and
automate some random manual tasks through scripting" is doable.

------
kylequest
Take home assignments are as perfect as it gets (the assignments need to align
with the role you have and there are also some challenges related to the
scalability of the process and, in some cases, cheating). It filters those who
think they are too good for it and it gives an opportunity for those who are
competent and eager enough and those who don't do so well under stress when
they are interrogated in front of a whiteboard (most people).

Those who complain that it takes too long to do homework assignments are not
being honest about the actual time it takes to prepare for the traditional
trivia-based interviews where it takes weeks and sometimes months to prepare.
Somehow it's hard to find 2 - 3 hours for a homework assignment, but 6 month
to prepare for a quiz interview is totally ok. Exaggerating a bit to make a
point ;-)

Technical interviewing shouldn't be a separate skill engineers have to master
because nobody wins here. The companies get people who are good at
interviewing instead of doing the actual work the companies care about. Of
course, the communication part of the interview is important because the
engineers will need to work in a team environment.

~~~
j_s
> _those who are competent and eager enough_

That's one way to put it!

It's obviously none of my business, but I can't help but be curious whether
you are currently responsible for hiring decisions, and if so whether or not
you use take home assignments, and finally if so whether or not it is paid
for. Or perhaps as an employee the process worked out for you. In either case,
more details documenting how take home assignments work best in practice would
always be appreciated!

A take home assignment beats many alternatives, but places the entire burden
on the potential employee (employers love it!).

~~~
kylequest
This is my position on both sides. I'll pick a homework assignment anytime
when I have a chance as a candidate. I have lots of life commitments and this
is one of the big reasons why I like it. I also like it because it's an
opportunity to shine and be creative (it depends on the assignment, of
course).

Yes, it's not perfect because you can end up dealing with somebody who doesn't
like how you comment your code or they don't like your tests... It's actually
a good thing in most cases because it also filters out the companies where you
wouldn't want to work anyways.

It's an opportunity to have a meaningful and relevant conversation.

~~~
j_s
> _It 's an opportunity to have a meaningful and relevant conversation._

This sounds like the key and something many who complete take home assignments
don't get.

[edit] Thanks for taking the time to add a bit more context.

~~~
kylequest
Not all assignments are created equal. Like with anything it has to be well
done.

When I hire people I craft the assignments for each candidate depending on the
role and the person on the other side. It's also important to communicate the
expectations and the desired outcomes. And it's also important to give an
opportunity to the candidate to have a follow up requirements discovery step
where they can ask any questions about the assignment.

------
lawlessone
The worse process i ever did was for company that gave me an online test with
no feedback. it was the lack of feedback that was the worst.

------
tlb
There are two kinds of companies: those with a high hiring bar, and those with
a low one. It's less work to get a job at low-bar companies, so why would you
apply to a high-bar company?

If the caliber of people you work with is a major factor in how much you enjoy
working somewhere, you should be applying to high-bar companies even though
it's more work.

Caliber of co-workers matters more or less with different kinds of work. In a
tight software development team, a small number of doofuses or toxic people
can make working there awful. In a typical outside sales team, co-worker
competence might not matter as much because you're each closing deals
independently. So there's no single answer.

------
minimaxir
To follow up from my data science job hunt postmortem
([https://twitter.com/minimaxir/status/951117788835278848](https://twitter.com/minimaxir/status/951117788835278848)),
I agree that the trend of having both an algorithm test _and_ a take-home
assignment before an onsite is the new standard for hiring in 2017. For data
science, I believe take homes are a better assessment of skill. Fortunately,
most of my take-homes were 2-3 hours.

The exception was a take-home that took _16 hours_ due to its massive scope,
which in retrospect I should have rejected.

------
dfcarney
I work at a company where a “take home” assignment is a routine part of
evaluating candidates who have made it through the initial screenings and
face-to-face discussions. However, we set up all such assignments as small
contracts (say 2 - 10 hours, depending on the candidates availability, the
position, etc). We pay market rates and try to be as accommodating as
possible; sometimes, a candidate just can’t fit it in, so we find alternatives
or take more of a risk when we offer them a job. In general, however, it’s a
great system for us and, I feel, very fair. I see it as a cost of recruiting
and risk mitigation.

------
orionblastar
Why should I do a whiteboard or take home assignment?

Job I had in 2002 I did whiteboard and a take home assignment. I was hired but
once I fixed the speed problem in their code running slow I was fired because
they didn't need me because they got my take home assignment and white board
info to give to the next programmer they want to screw over.

I'd rather pop popcorn or bake pizzas than work with a company like that
again.

------
southphillyman
Currently I don't do take home assignments or code challenges because I don't
have to in order to get the kind of jobs I want. So far when I apply for new
opportunities it's with multiple companies so I have options. That gives me
leverage to pick and choose what kind of process I will endure. How is it any
different than companies dismissing candidates for arbitrary reasons. It's the
privilege of not being desperate and we need to yield it as much as possible
in this current employment climate in order to improve conditions for all.

The last take home code challenge I ignored didn't stop them from bringing me
in for an in person. I gladly coded there for them on a whiteboard since BOTH
of our time would be at stake. Apparently my refusal to do the challenge
wasn't a big deal since they still extended an offer. Companies will adjust if
the majority of candidates refuse to participate in this kind of thing.

------
r0m4n0
I think these take home assignments can cause undue resentment toward a
company mostly because how the interviewers handle the process.

I interviewed with Algolia as a solutions engineer. Initial phone screening,
followed by a pair programming session, followed by a take home assignment. I
spent a good 4 hours on the take home assignment and as those hours passed I
began to get more frustrated in the amount of time I was investing in an
opportunity I still wasn’t sure about. They were still mostly faceless people
and the team still a mystery. They poked holes over Skype in some of the ways
I implemented their requirements. Never got an offer and I’ll never forget
that time I wasted. Looks like their questions are still up...

First this: [https://github.com/algolia/solutions-hiring-
assignment/blob/...](https://github.com/algolia/solutions-hiring-
assignment/blob/master/README.md)

Then this: [https://github.com/algolia/solutions-hiring-
assignment/blob/...](https://github.com/algolia/solutions-hiring-
assignment/blob/master/customer-questions.md)

Part of the time sink was learning their product which I had no experience
with. The second was deciding which of their js libraries to use (I picked the
wrong one first so that wasted a good hour). One hour learning/setting up
Algolia, loading data, etc. One hour writing meticulous html/css. 30 min
writing js for the wrong Algolia library. 30 min writing js for the correct
library. One hour answering the final written questions.

I interviewed with another company (Clara Lending) that actually had a very
similar process but we reviewed the take home assignment during the onsite
interview. I think I respect that company a lot (even though I didn’t get an
offer from them either) because they gave me the reciprocal time in person.

------
oceanghost
I always have thought the primary determinant of the take-home test is not the
code quality-- assuming you don't make any gross errors, but rather they are
literally testing your compliance.

I base this on having done a few and been given absolute deadlines. One time I
was _moving_ that weekend, but the company wouldn't budge on their deadline.

Another company-- I do two phone screens, and the guy who would be my manager
asks if I would be willing to do a take-home test. I ask him, "About how long
should it take me?' "I don't know." "How do you grade the tests?" "I don't
know." "Whats the subject of the test?" "I don't know." "When do you need it?"
"Two days from now." So I say, "So the only thing you know about this test is
you need it NOW?"

It didn't go well. Now I just quote them my consulting rate.

Don't code for free.

------
throwaway55356
I have been outright refusing to do take-home tests and coding challenges. I
do not care if it means fewer opportunities. They are not worth the stress. In
a few cases the employer waived them, sometimes they tried to cajole me into
doing it, a few other times there was hand-waving and excuses on their side.

------
Mission90
I'm with you, man. It's gotten ridiculous.

I've interviewed at Big Tech and it's always been a time consuming
nightmare...HR phone call, 1+ hr. online coding session full of esoteric BS,
entire day spent onsite to ultimately get rejected for reasons unknown. This
is with me having 8+ yrs experience. I never would've imagined getting
recruiters from Google, Faceboook, MS, etc. reaching out and me being annoyed
rather than excited, but fuck the CTCI, time-consuming interview gauntlet.

I've resigned myself to working on shitty enterprise CRUD apps rather than
somewhere interesting.

------
pdelbarba
I'm split on this. If it's <=1hr of work I wouldn't be super upset. I also
don't mind whiteboarding as long as it's not just a bunch of banal garbage
that google could divulge in a microsecond but unfortunately most interviewers
go for the low hanging fruit. At the end of the day, companies aren't going to
want to wait a ton of time to complete the interview because they usually want
someone yesterday so I doubt that they're going to want to go to a 17
interview series to vet people.

------
j_s
I think this could be tempered by a "check in everything you've got after __
hour(s)" time limit. Maybe allow requesting the problem details whenever ready
and expecting a response within a given time frame?

This definitely ups the pressure, and things like hardware/internet failures
would muddy the waters.

It sounds like even a commitment guaranteeing opportunity for discussion &
feedback would be enough to satisfy several commenters here, but that is rare
for liability reasons when employees are turned down.

------
msla
I'd be concerned that these take-home assignments were really jobs the company
needed done and were willing to solve Mechanical Turk-style, only with unpaid
Mechanical Turks.

~~~
FireBeyond
I've done one (mentioned elsewhere here) that I'm almost certain was exactly
that.

------
lkrubner
A take home test is not as bad a whiteboard test. As for whiteboard tests, see
"Embarrassing code I wrote under stress at a job interview"

[http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/embarrassing-code-
i-w...](http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/embarrassing-code-i-wrote-
under-stress-at-a-job-interview)

------
expertentipp
The best I've recently encountered were "1-2 hours" assignments with the words
"enjoy the task!" or something similar. FUCK YOU. I'm going to print it, I'm
going to find you, and I'm going to stick it up your butthole.

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wufufufu
Don't rat me out when you testify and we'll both only serve 1 year in prison.

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drngdds
Look at these lucky people who can afford to just not do an interview because
they dislike the process

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xxpor
Look at these unlucky people who can't afford to do an interview because they
require 6-10 hour homework assignments.

For all of the talk about getting people into coding, especially non-
traditional students, stuff like this really hurts the rhetoric. If you're
already working 2 jobs, or have kids, etc, asking someone to do 6+ hours of
unpaid work is frankly offensive.

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debt
Yeah and don’t get the job. It is pretty simple.

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alistairSH
I don't want to work for a company that expects me to spend a weekend (or
fractional weekend) working for free. If they're trying to draw me away from
my current employer, they need to do better than that. :shrugs:

~~~
debt
I agree. But not doing the interview, most of the time, prevents one from
getting the job.

