[Sohcahtoa82]

I'm always kind of surprised that the "take-home exam" type of job interview gets so much hate on HN.

Even if it takes me up to 8 hours to do the work at home, I think I'd rather do that. I feel like I'm pretty good at application security and programming, but I struggle to think on my feet when someone is grilling me with a job on the line. As soon as the interview is over, I get a huge case of staircase wit and think of all the better answers I could have given for each question. Even something as simple as "What's CSRF?", I could write pages about. But at a job interview? I have a hard time coming up with more than two-sentence answers.

Same thing with coding. I've written programs using breadth-first search, depth-first search, quicksort, binary searching, etc. Ask me to do it in a job interview and suddenly I'll forget the syntax for `if`.

Though FWIW, I haven't had a take-home interview test. Maybe I'd feel differently if I was actually given one.

[flosincapite]

These "exam"-style interviews are innately suspect for the same reason they are useful: because they approximate real work very closely.

Look at how many malicious entities use spurious job postings to farm resumes and other kinds of data. You think there aren't unscrupulous companies out there extracting free labor from their "interviews"?

If the employer is very reputable, you might be able to feel safe undertaking this kind of interview. But when you are applying to a shady tech start-up (and they are all shady, and they're where most of the jobs are), there is no way to know whether the job actually exists.

[emodendroket]

The thing is, if I spend 8 hours prepping for algorithmic interviews, I can use that prep for several interviews. If I spend 8 hours solving a toy problem, it is completely useless anywhere else.