[Aurornis]

> There is no guarantee they will read your responses with the same care you put into writing them - almost certainly they won't,

Nothing is guaranteed in hiring. Demanding that another person “waste time” sitting in front of you before you’ll answer questions is strange. Wouldn’t you rather answer the questions on your own time without someone else putting you on the spot?

It’s not very rational to avoid applying to a company just because you think they might not read what you wrote.

> Until then, I think the better approach if you're interested in a place like this is to be so awesome they have to call you first.

So answering a few questions is too much work, but becoming so “awesome” that you’re top 0.01% of industry talent who maintains a public profile so prevalent that they seek you out is the better way to apply?

Applying to a company and investing a few hours interviewing is accessible to everyone. Becoming a high-visibility, industry leader with active public profiles that attract companies is very, very hard.

[TulliusCicero]

> Nothing is guaranteed in hiring. Demanding that another person “waste time” sitting in front of you before you’ll answer questions is strange. Wouldn’t you rather answer the questions on your own time without someone else putting you on the spot?

No, because if that's the process, for all you know they're requesting answers from 1000 people for one position. With synchronous interviews, you have reasonable confidence that there's a limited number of people they're going through this process with, that you have a decent chance at the position.

[Aurornis]

> No, because if that's the process, for all you know they're requesting answers from 1000 people for one position.

Why would any company engage with 1000 candidates and request these samples from them with no expectation of reading them?

I don’t understand this desire to assume the absolute worst, even when it’s illogical for the company to do so.

[TulliusCicero]

> Why would any company engage with 1000 candidates and request these samples from them with no expectation of reading them?

Because there's little downside to do doing so. And of course they would read some of them, they do need to hire someone, but they might not read all.

> I don’t understand this desire to assume the absolute worst, even when it’s illogical for the company to do so.

It's not necessarily illogical. They can just blast out "give us samples" to a large number of people, and then filter out most of them based on whatever they feel like later on.

It also means that later on they can brag about they're so elite that "they only hire 0.1% of the people they interview", if the company culture bends that way.

[bcantrill]

The company culture does not bend that way at all. To the contrary, as I have said repeatedly (and other Oxide folks have said), it has been really difficult to turn away folks who could plausibly succeed at Oxide.

[justahuman74]

They're not really engaging if they're asking you to asynchronously do paperwork. The effort asymmetry makes it a bad bargain for those who do put in the work as there's no way to know that it'll even be looked at.

[justahuman74]

> Wouldn’t you rather answer the questions on your own time without someone else putting you on the spot?

Honestly no, as you might spend loads of time crafting the perfect response, only to find that they hadn't really worded the question in a way that meant your answered what they were really thinking. This happens often enough in in-person interviews as it is, but atleast you can hope to course-correct by looking at how they respond. The lack of time-bounding is a real problem for those who have genuine time-commitments outside of work

[meejah]

Yes, 100%

Also, if "everyone" has a 1 hour interview (or whatever) then you're more-or-less comparing equal things. If some people use a week to craft their "asynchronous" responses while some have an hour to do so (because they're already employed, say, or have a family) then you're not comparing apples to apples.

Similar for "take home code exercises": it's impossible to compare them meaningfully because you have no idea if the better-looking one took the candidate an hour or several days (and yes, I've been on both sides of this).

[subarctic]

>So answering a few questions is too much work, but becoming so “awesome” that you’re top 0.01% of industry talent who maintains a public profile so prevalent that they seek you out is the better way to apply?

That's definitely the better strategy. Or networking can replace having the public profile. That being said if you haven't gotten there yet, it might make sense to do all this work anyway because that puts you in the 5% of candidates willing to jump through all these hoops to apply, but you'll definitely have a lower chance of getting in as just some rando applying on the internet than someone they already know.

[rbanffy]

> a public profile so prevalent that they seek you out is the better way to apply?

I wouldn’t consider myself anything near a high-profile candidate for anything, but I routinely turn down tempting offers from interesting companies.

The positive side is that I have lunch with a lot of cool people and, sometimes, even get the chance to show them my current city a little bit.