[nialo]

I am confused by this, could you help me to understand why this is so?

In particular, it seems to me that take-home assignments are strictly better for candidate scheduling etc than in-person interviews, if time spent can be held equal. Maybe time spent is just not equal very often?

[stale2002]

Because if a company is going to make me spend X hours of my time, then I want the company to be spending X hours of THEIR time.

[hackinthebochs]

Yes, absolutely. I say this every time this homework assignment shit pops up. It's offloading the cost of hiring on to prospective candidates. The asymmetry of cost should give everyone pause. It's plainly exploitative.

So you block off 4-8 hours of your life for this job you're really excited about. What is the employer putting up? Generally nothing. They get a sea of responses and they get to pick a few of the best ones. The 100 responses they got cost these candidates 400 hours of time for no cost to the employer whatsoever.

Take home assignments are fine, but the employer needs to put up something as well. Either pay for the time I spend on it, or have the assignment late in the interviewing process and have employment contingent on passing some known bar ahead of time. That is to say, I should be the only one doing the assignment and there should be no wishy-washy rejections.

[rnovak]

> What is the employer putting up? Generally nothing.

Unless you've been in the shoes of a hiring manager, I'm unsure as to where this idea is coming from?

Having been a hiring manager, it is a horrible experience. Unless it's extremely naive, homework sets generally take time to come up with and formalize, and certainly take time to review the results for.

I suppose I can understand conflating the motivations of an interviewer with their employer, but it's not generally true to say that interviewers are just trying to exploit those they interview.

[hackinthebochs]

>homework sets generally take time to come up with and formalize, and certainly take time to review the results for

It's a one-off effort to come up with an assignment. So the cost per application can be extremely low. As far as evaluating them, the bad ones can usually be tossed out in minutes or less. Comparatively, the cost per applicant is basically nothing.

[navalsaini]

How many companies waive the coding requirement or postpone it towards the end, if you already have open sourced a bunch of code. It is also possible that the HR managers are just happy taking a route, where they can offload most work to the other party. The can instead act as better intermediaries, aligning the hiring goals of the company and the experience for the applicant. Whats wrong with asking them to create better value or understand the domain better so as to be able to create better value?

[prodigal_erik]

> if you already have open sourced a bunch of code

How do I know you wrote it and didn't merely paste your name over some project I've never heard of?

[navalsaini]

Thats quite easy.

1) How many forks and stars do you have? 2) How often have you opensourced? 3) Have you blogged about them or created a documentation? 4) Why did they build each of those repos? 5) Commit logs... etc..

Very easy to develop such a framework.

One or two repos can be copied, but there is ample signature on a genuine open source contributors.

[gnaritas]

> It's offloading the cost of hiring on to prospective candidates. The asymmetry of cost should give everyone pause. It's plainly exploitative.

There's nothing wrong with that, it's a competitive market, those who get hired are those willing to compete, not those who complain about unfairness about being asked to demonstrate their skills. Employers spend tons of time filtering candidates, even reviewing the submitted work takes time and effort, saying it's no cost to the employer whatsoever is not only untrue, it's naive.

[mavelikara]

> So you block off 4-8 hours of your life for this job you're really excited about. What is the employer putting up? Generally nothing.

What?! Up until that point, typically, the employer had crafted the job posting, posted in on various channels, reviewed the responses, talked to promising candidates, and then give you the assignment. And a good assignment needs to be carefully crafted, a process that usually takes an order of magnitude time more than what it takes to prepare an answer.

[consz]

An order of magnitude is not much though, that's only ten applicants? Most assignments waste the time of hundreds of applicants, so it sounds like its still a net win for the employer.

[nialo]

It feels to me like the root problem here isn't how many people are doing the homework problem or whatever. It's that this is increasing your time spent as a candidate relative to the in-person interview.

I think your last paragraph is very close, but I think the thing that matters is "no wishy-washy rejections". Not being the only person taking the test or how much time the company spends seem like ways to make that happen to me.

Maybe I'm just completely wrong here, but I think most of the objections to homework type tests are being caused by processes where the homework test was in addition to the in-person whiteboard interview, not instead of it.

How would you feel about a process that was: some preliminary screening -> nominal 4 hour homework thing -> in person meeting to confirm that you're not a complete asshole and negotiate salary?

[cagataygurturk]

Job seeking is a sales activity. You sell your labor on labor market. Every sales activity has a cost. If you do not want to bear this high cost of IT industry, you can work at McDonalds. Probably your sales cost would be much less but your profit also.

[stale2002]

What job market do you live in?

It is a sellers market. I get recruited every single day. Any company that disrespects me and wastes my time isn't going to be very successful at convincing me to work there.

Developers are the ones with the power in this market, and I have no problem throwing this power around.

[cagataygurturk]

Then go on with your current arrogance. Hope the market continues like this for you.

[rnovak]

Unless they have a gun to your head, they aren't making you do anything. Applying/Interviewing is your choice.

[navalsaini]

He is saying that the company needs to tell their people to fix the process and do what they are paid for. Not offload it entirely to the applicant.

Maybe just open separate channels for people who have an open source portfolio. I have about 30 repos in my OSS, but still have to take these assignments. Its such an utter waste of my time.

[stale2002]

Yes.... And I would choose NOT to apply to such a company, because F them.

[jpttsn]

This just seems petty. Do you actually want the job? Or are you just there to spread some kindergarten version of justice?

[stale2002]

I do not want to work for a company who disrespects me and my time.

That is a huge red flag, and means that they will disrespect me at work as well.

[wool_gather]

It does, if they're actually doing it in a way that's useful to them. At least one, probably two, engineers are going to evaluate what you send in, take notes, and then go over it with you. And they have to do that for every response.

So that's an absolute floor of an engineer-hour per candidate: Anything less than 30 minutes to read through it and take notes is useless, and figure another 30 minutes minimum for a call.

If they're not going over the responses in detail and then talking through them with the candidates, then they're just wasting their own time because they're not actually judging anything.

[gnaritas]

That's a good way to get passed over for good jobs. As a potential candidate, you aren't in a position to making such demands and your unwillingness to demonstrate your skills on a simple assignment just means you won't be considered. Plenty of other fish in the sea who have no problem completing a simple assignment.

[throw_away_777]

It depends how desperate the candidate is for a job. A coding assignment may have a hidden cost of filtering out many qualified candidates, if qualified candidates don't feel the need to apply to companies with these assignments. Anecdotally, these assignments seem like just another filter companies use, they don't replace any steps in the process, just one more hurdle to pass.

[gnaritas]

If you aren't willing to demonstrate your skills with a little coding assignment, I don't consider you a qualified candidate. I've used a coding test for years, always get exactly the good kind of people I want, it filters out the lazy and the liars, most programming candidates are liars and simply don't have the chops they claim.

[idiot_stick]

>Plenty of other fish in the sea who have no problem completing a simple assignment.

And yet companies have an incredibly hard time hiring talent, even with so many other fish out there. Odd, that.

People need to start understanding their value as an employee. You create more value than you're worth; that's why companies need workers. You don't need to bend over for a potential employer. Plenty of other fish in the sea of employers, too.

[gnaritas]

It's not odd at all, those are old school companies playing by the old rules of looking for candidates locally. And demonstrating your skills isn't bending over, it's showing your value and it's how you get a job. Seriously, this notion that you should be hired for a high paying job without needing to audition for it is just absurd; I wouldn't hire anyone with your attitude.

[stale2002]

I get recruiting emails literally every day, and people call me on my cell phone, unprompted, once a week. So yes, I absolutely am in such a position to make such demands. If a company doesn't like it, then they can do me a favor by passing me over.

And I am honestly just an average SF engineer.

The current engineering market let's me choose whatever company I want.

So, I am not going to waste my valuable time with companies that disrespect me, when there are a hundred more that I could be talking to instead.

[gnaritas]

Great, but that's an artifact of living in the SF bubble which isn't anything like the rest of the planet. That is not the current engineering market, that's the current SF market. And asking you to demonstrate your skills isn't disrespecting you, you work in an industry that doesn't have a professional certification which means it's loaded with people trying to fake it for the big paycheck; due to that, it's perfectly reasonable for companies to ask for proof of skills. If that makes you feel disrespected, you aren't in touch which what it takes to run a business.

[stale2002]

Don't care. I am the one with the power. And I have no problem using this power to my advantage.

The way that a business relationship works, is that the person with the power gets to make the decisions. And in the market that I am in, that person is me.

And I have no problem demonstrating my skills. I just demand that there is another person from the company, on the other end of the phone line or other end of the table, investing the same amount of time into the relationship as me.

If a company thinks that it is unreasonable for me to demand an equal time investment from them, well sucks to be that company, because as we have already established, they aren't the ones with the power, so their opinion doesn't really matter. They can go find someone else to interview.

[gnaritas]

> They can go find someone else to interview.

Oh most happily will, even talking to you is a pain, I wouldn't work with you if you paid me. You're arrogant and entitled, you'd make an awful employee.

[PeterisP]

It may depend on the industry, but in tech generally there's not plenty of other fish in the sea - there's a scarcity of qualified candidates but plenty of other potential employers who desperately want to hire.

[gnaritas]

That's really not true; there's only a scarcity if you insist on locality. There's no shortage of qualified remote workers when you open up your search the whole country or whole world. Employers crying about scarcity are employers who haven't figured out remote working is the future.

[aisofteng]

If you're applying for a job, you're asking for the company to pay you a salary and to believe you can provide labor worth that salary. You can find a few hours.