No need to be sorry, I wouldn't apply to your company, and you would be lucky to even get a reply from me if contacting me on the typical social networks for developers.
What red flags did you see? That we pay top of market? That we work to have a low stress environment? That we put life before work instead of work before life? That we prioritize having the best benefits on the market, including platinum health care with $0 employee contribution and full mental health coverage for therapy and medication not covered through insurance? That we don't overload our top performers by giving them more work when they overperform but instead let them take the extra time off? Which of those is a red flag? Everyone at our company is very happy. Apparently some people don't like coding exercises. That's fine. We require people to demonstrate they can code. Everyone at the company has to go through that. We'll miss out on some candidates because of that, but I'd much rather miss a few candidates than have some false positives. I'm sorry that ruffles some feathers. We honestly strive to have the best work environment possible for engineers based upon my many years of being abused, overworked, and having to go through absolutely horrible, long, miserable interview processes. We do 1-2 interviews and ask you to code a little. I don't think that's unreasonable, especially considering all of the benefits on the other side.
All of these are policies I've worked hard to implement to create the absolute best environment in the world for my engineers to thrive. I've had to fight for them since they aren't cheap. It hurts me when someone says taking an hour out of their week to do a coding interview isn't worth it when I've taken dozens to hundreds out of mine to make their job as easy and enjoyable when they get accepted into our culture. It's insulting to me to say that asking for an hour of your time is not worth everything above and much more that I've strived for to make our company a fantastic place to work at.
So, like I said, what red flags did you see exactly?
Those are a lot of words that could be empty. It's easy for me to see the red flags:
1. Mentioning firing in the very first post when talking about hiring.
2. Take home interview tests, showing you don't value your potential employee's time.
3. And this is an interesting one: accusing someone of having a poor work ethic when you don't know them and they didn't show any sign of it. This is a big red flag because it points to you equating disagreements with performance, which makes #1 even more of a red flag.
1. Hire slow, fire fast is an incredible common and accepted form of hiring (https://hbr.org/2014/03/hire-slow-fire-fast). I thought we were discussing hiring here? My post was not meant to attract employees but to share my thoughts as an employer. You sound like someone who has not done much hiring/firing.
2. If employees don't think an hour of their time is worth it to work for us, then they are clearly not a fit. Those people obviously don't value working for us. We have the easiest, fastest, most painless interview process of any company I have ever worked at, by design. We don't do whiteboard questions, we don't do 8 hour multi-person tech review days, we don't ask odd l33tcode questions or brain teasers, we don't make you wait weeks to hear back from us, we never ghost anyone, and we usually give a decision within 72 hours. Asking an hour to prove you can code seems perfectly reasonable given most companies ask for significantly more of your time. Every employer I've worked at before took up 2-5x as much time interviewing as we do. If that hour is what is preventing you from working for us, go work somewhere else as it tells me a lot about you and how much you'll value working for us.
To me, its the outright refusal to spend an hour doing something you claim to be adept at, because you've failed to understand the other person's problem despite it being explained multiple times.
Maybe you just haven't hired or worked with someone who can't code yet.
It's not the liars that are being filtered out (they're easy to detect), but its those who genuinely believe they are good developers.
That's my thought too. I don't think this person has done much hiring so they don't understand the problem set. I haven't solved how to tell if someone can code without some kind of coding exercise. If I could, I wouldn't do it.
I've at least gotten rid of l33tcode, 8 hour technical interviews, whiteboard BS, in-person high-pressure timed coding exercises, brain teasers, etc.. All the worst stuff. I thought that was good enough. Apparently asking for an hour of someone's time to get a great job is too much these days.
Take home tests are never just an hour. They're open ended traps designed to find out who is willing to put in unpaid overtime. The OP themselves admitted to expanding the scope of a take home test they were given by around 10x because they felt it would give them an edge.
This is what a ton of candidates end up doing, knowing that others are going to as well. Especially when the take home test could be sent to a massive number of people.
Spend a few hours with me and watch me code. Show you care. I'm not rejecting the idea of spending time coding for an interview.
Like I said in my other post, your unwillingness to invest any time into getting hired tells me a lot about you. Let me tell you a story about how I got hired for a job I really wanted.
They had a take home. Ridiculously simple. Build a 4 endpoint CRUD API for bear sightings. Took about 20 minutes in Python Flask. Sent it in, immediately moved to the next round which was two weeks away.
You know what I did in those two weeks? I rebuilt the same API in Node, Typescript, Rust, Go, C++, Ruby, Django, Sanic, and I think a few more.
Then I deployed it on App Engine, Lambda, EC2, Google VM, Kubernetes, Elastic Beanstalk, ECS, and my local home dual Xeon server. (while keeping the compute size of all of the cloud offerings as equal as possible)
Then I benchmarked them all. Turns out how you deployed it made little difference but the language made a huge difference. Sanic came in 2nd place while Rust was far and away the winner.
Then I wrote a 10 page report including my methods, code, charts, and tables showing the results.
Two weeks later when I arrived at my onsite interview, I was scheduled to meet with 8 people for 8 hours to talk BS l33tcode questions. You know what I did? Explained what I had spent my time doing. They loved it.
I got a very nice offer that day and worked there for 3 years.
Sometimes the amount of effort you show a company how much you want to work there is what can land you the job.
I didn't ask to be paid for that time and I was employed elsewhere. I did this in the evenings and weekends during what would otherwise be social media downtime.....and it was fun. I explored new technologies, learned several new languages, and expanded my abilities as a developer. I don't regret that time investment one bit.
And you're saying you can't take one hour to do a take home?
That DOES tell me a lot about you.
edit: To be clear, this didn't take away from any of my other activities. I still ate out, spent time with friends, went out, etc.. This just took away from useless social media time and turned it into something productive. I also had a lot of fun not only exploring everything but also knowing I'd have a lock on a well compensated position and be in control of my interviews instead of their potentially being disinterested in just another candidate. It was time very well spent. I don't nearly expect this kind of investment from any of our applicants but if someone demonstrated they wanted to work for me that much you'd bet I'd hire them.
edit 2: I was also told later that numerous applicants struggled with this take home assignment despite it being literal CS 101 level stuff. That's why getting a sense of it someone can code is so important.
So do you have applicants write a 4 endpoint API with flask, or do you have them implement an elevator system which you describe as very hard? I've actually given that question in an hour long interview. But guess what? They get to stop at an hour, instead of guessing how much work they need to do to move on. You and I know that someone could probably make a career working on that system.
When you commit your time and set actual deadlines (such as 1 hour), they don't think they need to write a multi-elevator system with floor input outside the elevator and account for load and time of day or write it in 8 languages and write a 10 page report on the whole thing. They just spend an hour with me and we go through the problem and see how far we get.
You could be spamming that question out to hundreds applicants for all I know. Show you care and spend the time with me. I get several interview requests per day, I'm not wasting my time unless I think a company respects me. I'm in a nice position where I don't need to show I can be exploited by doing a ton of unpaid overtime work.
Tell us who you are and what your company is. You truly sound like a terrible employer based on your shocking responses. You came here to ask for feedback and then when you got it you didn't like it. You are clearly the issue of why you can't hire developers. I'd wish you good luck but I won't.
We're a terrible employer? Let me tell you what kind of employer we are.
We pay top 1% of market. We work to have a low stress environment. We put life before work instead of work before life. We prioritize having the best benefits on the market, including platinum health care with $0 employee contribution and full mental health coverage for therapy and medication not covered through insurance. We don't overload our top performers by giving them more work when they overperform but instead let them take the extra time off. We give everyone when they join a private office and an unlimited budget to buy tech and decorate it to their heart's desire. We don't have required hours in the office or even require that people come to the office at all. Most people do though since they enjoy their nicely decorated private offices with multiple high end monitors and tricked out desktops.
Which part of that makes us a terrible employer? That we ask people for an hour of their time to do a coding exercise? Is that how your judge if an employer is good or bad?
I could have missed it since I’m reading on my phone before my morning coffee, but you don’t appear to have stated where you work. I’m curious where it is since if you would employ someone remote from overseas you sound like a great “no bullshit” employer/company!
Thank you. I don't advertise where I work on HN since I enjoy the ability to comment freely although we hire on all the standard job websites, including overseas.
My former employer has the best benefits package is the business but it doesn't mean I'd want to work there again. Any employer is made up by the people you will work with not fringe benefits. If you are one of those people then I wouldn't want to work there. I don't care about the wallpaper.
I see you went back through a lot of responses and edited them. Why is that?