[busterarm]

In general I find them to be completely unrealistic if you're trying to find anyone good.

Someone really good will already have a full time job, a limited number of "sick days" to use for interviewing and is probably somewhere in the interview process with at least 3 other companies -- probably closer to 5 or 7. Then they might have family responsibilities on top of that.

I budget 4, maybe 6 hours if I really like you, on any company in the application process -- tops. Almost 100% of this time is taken up by interviews. You want me to give your company a whole weekend of my time on some chance that you might hire me? In addition to hours of interviews? That already tells me that I don't want to work for you -- especially if I haven't at least interviewed with 3 technical people already. It's one of the clearest negative signals I know of.

If I work 13 days in a row without a day off, I'm going to be a crabby asshole at my job and probably blow all of my other interviews until I recuperate. Your company isn't worth that.

[djtriptych]

This is a little silly. If you’re “really good” you may be talking about signing on for a 4-5 expected commitment at $1M+ Total compensation over the course of your tenure. Million dollar contracts require due diligence. 4-5 man days between both companies is totally reasonable.

If you’re interviewing with 7 (!) companies at a time, maybe be a little more discerning about where you’re trying to work. Everybody wins if you’re specific on that point.

[busterarm]

> If you’re interviewing with 7 (!) companies at a time, maybe be a little more discerning about where you’re trying to work. Everybody wins if you’re specific on that point.

Oh please, honestly. I'm not a terribly good programmer, but after 2+ years at one company, my inbox was flooded with emails from recruiters representing companies with very interesting opportunities (and like 10x as much crap). Then there's the friends and former coworkers who have been regularly asking me to come work with them.

Once I made the decision to leave my last company, I talked to about 9 companies over a 1.5 month period, and it only lasted that long because of Christmas & New Years. At least 5 of those went through multiple interview rounds and I was juggling 4 different, attractive offers before picking one. This is just from the 9 that I decided to talk to...

I live in a major market and there's a lot of demand here and in my focus areas. A lot of companies that you don't think have interesting problems actually have fascinating problems to work on once you talk to them. Probably much more so than GOOG, FB, AMZN, etc.

You talk about being discerning, but how do you know if you can deliver value until you have a conversation with them? You end up talking to that many companies at once because once you start the process with them you have to be respectful and see their process through to the end, but you don't stop interviewing while you wait for a decision.

[pjc50]

This might make sense for the >$200k jobs, but you know those are specific to a few companies in a few cities. Yet the homework trend will spread to all sorts of companies with much less competitive money.

It's very interesting how even the Internet mega-giants haven't solved distributed working enough that they can avoid paying the massive premium for people to move to SF.

[djtriptych]

Yikes at the typos!

- 4-5 year expected commitment.

- 4-5 man-days between both parties.

Anyway, talking to a company is rather different than interviewing. Sure, explore opportunities. But no need to write a line of code until they’ve made an attractive proposition. I’d be surprised to see that happen 7 times within a week or two.

[busterarm]

Just for some color: The only company that's given me a weekend challenge that ever gave me an offer was 8th Light. I've done live coding and whiteboarding with other companies and received offers, but the take home work has only been productive that one time. I've had code I submitted to these looked over by better programmers than myself and heard very few negative comments, all minor.

After some years of experience, I can't see myself doing one of these again pretty much ever.