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by TulliusCicero 958 days ago
> 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.

1 comments

> 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.

> 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.

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.
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.