[BA4gDY-cqjsEPWn]

There's a million reasons why you could and will get rejected that have nothing to do with the code you've written for the take home exercise. My usual solution is to ignore the losses and carry on with the grind. You only need to win once. Good luck!

[formulathree]

Thanks for the tip. Yeah I know this.

Just wondering though with 4 failures in a row, I think there is a good chance something is wrong with my code so I wanted to make sure with this post.

I've been doing the grind for years, but this is the first time I had so many take home projects.

Additionally, I never gotten hired by doing a good take-home either. Which is weird.

Additional question: What's your guys take on take-homes: Anybody ever successfully get hired by doing well on a take-home?

[sircastor]

I think you’re unfortunately in a sellers market for jobs. It was already kind of a terrible experience, but given all the recent layoffs, you’re going up against lots of competitors, and the hiring companies don’t have a lot of incentive to provide feedback.

As ridiculous as it may sound, don’t take it personally.

[formulathree]

>As ridiculous as it may sound, don’t take it personally.

Yeah thanks for the tip. I'm not taking it personally. But I still do consider this practice rude and inappropriate. It's just the rudeness is not directed at me personally but at everyone in general.

It still will reflect on the company regardless of whether anyone takes it personally.

[mstipetic]

I’ve hired a lot of people and tbh it’s so much work on top of your existing work, with a scramble every time to find slots that fit for several people, the tediousness of doing the same interview over and over, it’s just hard to find time or energy to provide feedback, you’re mostly just focused on moving forward the candidates you want to.

I know it’s shitty but that’s the reality, it’s nothing personal. When doing the interviews I always give my best to be engaged and respect their time, but other things tend to fall through the cracks

[formulathree]

No. If the candidate spends four hours on a take-home it is basically a moral obligation that you give feedback.

The exchange is literally unbalanced here. You ask for four hours from the candidate. The candidate asks for 1 hour from you for feedback.

The candidate is also doing things on top of existing work to spend time and energy on a take-home.

There's no two ways about it. Morally it's the wrong thing to do.

[mstipetic]

Yeah ok fine sue me. We’re all understaffed and overworked.

[Woshiwuja]

Honestly i dont think the code was the problem, maybe hr just didnt like you

[formulathree]

This is possible. But I did do an interview with HR screening and they passed me which gave me access to this takehome. I know I seem a little abrasive in my replies here, but I'm being genuine... a lot of the criticism I'm seeing doesn't make sense or seem overly pedantic to me.

But! there was one huge flaw with my code! like huge. Only one person in this entire thread caught it. This is a rejection level flaw for sure. It may have been it but this thread is making me think it might not be.

What's astonishing is that nobody caught it. Nobody but one guy. This flaw would've gone past all unit tests all type checking and all integration tests. No engineering process would've caught it other then analyzing the code line by line and seeing exactly what each step does.

So it makes me think that if more or less no one on this thread caught it... it's likely that the reviewer didn't catch it either. I'm thinking it's more likely some superficial aspect of the code screwed me over even though this flaw is huge. Like no unit tests or something.

It's not even some obscure flaw either it's very visible. the ZRANK call isn't doing anything. it's an empty command with discarded output... a snippet generated by code from chatgpt which lied to me about what that command does. I tested that code extensively and it worked fine.

This mistake deserves rejection, but like I said, I somehow think that this wasn't what got me rejected.

[aprdm]

Why do you think random people on hackernews are going to take the effort to read your code ?