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by ChrisMarshallNY 1410 days ago
My experience is that, whether it be via interview, take-home, or whiteboard test, what employers are looking for, is $buzzwordDuJour.

I may be being generous. I am noticeably “older,” so it may have simply been bald-faced ageism, in my case. Maybe younger folks would have been given more latitude.

I remember getting a take-home, once, where they asked me to write an iOS app that leveraged a specific library. They did not provide a template. They simply sent me an email with a fairly vague spec (I'm fine with that). They also wanted me to use a specific $methodologyDuJour, that would have resulted in needlessly complex, underperformant, and buggy code.

At the time they gave it to me, I had a pretty serious personal family emergency, so I did the app, using the industry-standard method. I wrote a full-quality, localizable, documented app, in less than four hours. While my house was trying to burn down, so there was a bit of extra stress.

Oh, and also, I had never worked with the library they wanted me to use, so I had to learn the API.

So, I wrote a full native Swift iOS app, from scratch, learned a commercial API, integrated it, tested the app, documented it, and delivered an App Store ship-ready iOS app, with very high-Quality code, in about four hours, while under serious personal stress. I did let them know that I had had to deal with a "personal emergency," so the test was a bit "rushed."

They ghosted me hard after that. I was actually shocked at how discourteous they were, as everything before that, was great.

1 comments

Ghosting after take home tests are extremely common. Usually the longer the test the more likely you are to be ghosted.
It was also pretty damn stupid. That was one of the motivators for me to stop bothering to look. I didn't need the work, and I was looking for work that interested me (this was a hardware company that made a system that interested me).

They maybe didn't like that I used classic MVC for the app, because it is ... less than optimal ... to use other patterns, when writing a UIKit app. Of course, it's also possible that they finally brought in a tech manager, who figured out I was old, so...

But I regularly write full apps in record time. My GH repos are full of test harnesses that I toss together in no time at all. Pretty much every test harness is one that many folks would be proud to submit to the App Store. I’ve had over 20 published native apps, over the last ten years (mostly deprecated, these days), so I’m used to regularly shipping (and maintaining) native iOS apps.

I'd suggest that someone that can chock together an app like that, in just a few hours, while under a serious amount of external stress, could be someone worth following up on. BTW: The library was MapBox. I'd never worked with it before. I enjoyed the opportunity to learn about it, as I may use it in the future (offline maps, and it's a pretty decent dependency).

But that was about three years ago, and I'm actually really glad that I got chased out of the rat race. It just took me a while to appreciate it.