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by rnovak 3386 days ago
> 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.

2 comments

>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.

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?
> 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?

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.