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by shantly 2446 days ago
> From being a candidate myself, I've found that having someone watch me and being in a room with the stress and all motivates me to show my best. Whereas coding challenges I really lack the motivation and I end up rushing them, doing them last minute, and really not showing my best.

OTOH, whiteboards or live-coding under interview conditions is a great way to watch me do worse work than I did when I was less than a year out from writing my first hello world. And yeah, I'm cool & collected under normal shit's-broken pressure, or client's-pissed-off pressure, on the actual job, which is totally different.
1 comments
gremlinsinc 2446 days ago
Same, I can't code while being watched, but I can do a take home assessment. My favorites have been real world stuff like ... build x by creating your own MVC w/ x, y, and z as a base... like x router, y templating engine, etc...
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shantly 2446 days ago
Someone on here posted something about letting candidates pick an open issue on an open-source project and prep a PR for it, to go over. Easily my favorite version of a take-home assignment I've ever heard of—it's not throwaway junk or contrived bullshit, and I get to claim the PR if it gets accepted, whether or not you hire me, so while it's not paid it's also not a complete waste of my time if the job doesn't work out—but it's not repeatable the same way for every candidate (which is kind of the point? I mean selecting the issue to tackle is part of the assessment, which, as long as there's a little guidance about the sort of thing that's considered good-enough so you're not entirely in the dark re: expectations, seems ideal) so a certain kind of hiring manager or interviewer will think it's necessarily crap.
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gremlinsinc 2446 days ago
That's genius. Almost sounds like something that could be it's own Startup/SaaS. A marketplace of code 'assignments' that OSS projects need done, employer can 'tag' assignments that they approve of, then you submit your work to the employer/oss project simultaneously so both can do a code review of it, if you lose the job but it gets accepted by the OSS then at least there's that. -- The employer would be the only part paying $$ for the platform, but it could be tax deductible as a 'donation' to OSS perhaps.
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