[Rinzler89]

>I’m 27 and single. There lies the biggest advantage of a takehome assessment for me: I get to spend more time on it than someone with a wife and two kids.

I noticed the same thing. It seems take homes are mainly geared towards pre-selecting young single people with a lot of free time to code on the side besides their main job and other responsibilities, or who have no other responsibilities.

Now I'm also single and I have the time to invest in them, but I question the future of my career in tech, how will I be able to compete for new jobs later when I won't be, and take homes will be normalized? I don't remember my friends in other careers ever having to do unpaid work before getting a job. Perhaps I chose the wrong career.

What sucks even more is when you sink many hours in them and then just get ghosted, not even a rejection message, nada. I've already been burned twice by this. Or when the recruiter just spams you the take home link without first having a talk with you about the job details, the compensation range, if you're a good fit, etc. It's "first you solve this take home for us, then we can have a talk". Feels incredibly cold and inhumane.

[maxsilver]

> It seems take homes are mainly geared towards pre-selecting young single people with a lot of free time to code on the side besides their main job and other responsibilities, or who have no other responsibilities. (snip) I question the future of my career in tech, how will I be able to compete for new jobs later when I won't be, and take homes will be normalized?

My counterpoint to this is that takehome tests are great for folks who don't necessarily do well on brainteasers, but are otherwise strong functional developers. Despite having a family and children, I always prefer a takehome assessment. (And, just as an FYI, I'm 36 and a single parent to a young grade-schooler)

I might be biased, in that I feel like I do poorly in the live programming / brainteaser style interviews, but do strongly when I have a takehome assessment. Live programming is like a completely bizzaro-land version of programming, where a real person is staring you down while you type, observing your every interaction, and deciding your fate based on a random 60 minutes of the highest-stress part of your day. ("Oh, you googled a for loop syntax, you are clearly an idiot lying about your experience" when in fact, it's more like, "I get thrown 6 different programming languages every single week, each with similar but slightly varied syntax for every single thing, and having a person stare at me and decide the entire future of my career is a little bit stressful and anxiety-inducing").

With a takehome assessment, I can think about it for a while, I can write it all upfront, I can try a few different implementations and pick the one that feels best, I can accurately and intelligently explain exactly what I did and why I did it, I can talk in detail about the problem and potential tradeoffs. I can wrap the whole thing in nice automated testing, I can setup basic CI/CD for it on GitHub Actions or equivalent. I can demo my commitment to strong well-written clear documentation and dev experience, right in my branch Pull Request -- and all of that will likely be a closer match to what real-world day-to-day work at the new company might be like, than solving your LeetCode brainteaser.

I don't love "unpaid work before getting a job", yes that part sucks. But it sucks less than having a random stranger decide your an idiot, based on watching you sweat for an hour. Even if I'm going to get ultimately rejected anyway, the takehome route still feels better.

[bee_rider]

How’s your career going?

I’m often worried that I’ll look like a dummy when I have to look up basic loop syntax. I’m not dumb, and I’m somewhat experienced… I just write code in Python, Matlab, Fortran, Bash, whatever else. It is shocking that the basic shape of syntax can be so different!

And also the degree to which it doesn’t actually matter. It’s just when starting a new file. My brain needs a little bit of syntax around to get locked into the language I think.

[vundercind]

I have been paid to write code for over 20 years, in eight or nine languages, and wouldn’t bet a serious amount of money I could fizz-buzz in any of them, including one I wrote a bunch of today, without a reference. Not without getting something basic about the language wrong in a way that would keep it from working on the first try.

This is, if anything, becoming more true the longer I do this sort of work.

[williamcotton]

My brain refuses to learn bash conditional syntax. Personally, when I’m about to write a conditional in bash I take it as a cue to switch to another language.

[bee_rider]

    for i in $( ls | grep “a complicated enough filter that I never have to use conditionals in my loop”) ;
    do
         echo -n “if I don’t want to work on ” $i 
        echo “ it is time to change languages” 
    done

[margorczynski]

I guess an option is going into management, no take homes, DS&A groking, etc.

For me personally I prefer it to live coding as I can actually think because there's no stress but usually the "1-2h task" in reality is 8h if you want it done properly (good code, documentation, tests, project & build setup, etc.). If the job isn't top tier it is simply not worth it, at least in the previous market.

Still beats memorizing the optimal algorithms to LC questions.

[teeray]

> mainly geared towards pre-selecting young single people with a lot of free time

Which tells you exactly how exploitive they will be with that free time. You'll onboard, it'll be good for a bit, then suddenly there will be surprise crunch-mode that will never end.

> when you sink many hours in them and then just get ghosted, not even a rejection message

This will manifest in a thank you of a layoff after all those crunch hours.

> first you solve this take home for us, then we can have a talk

"Cool, I can take on that contract. I'll put together a quote for you and I'll get started. Who should I send my W-9 to?" Many will, of course, balk at this, which tells you everything you need to know about them. The good ones will pay it. Set your boundaries.

[A4ET8a8uTh0]

I think this is a valid use case. My concern with thing like that is that it can be abused relatively easily. Long time ago when I was a little boy, in the old country translating to/from English to earn some additional money while studying, I came across the practice of using students ( giving them a portion of the assignment and just run the project through applicants ). Naturally, if you are just starting, in tech it may be easier to judge if it is a real test of skill.

[FireBeyond]

In my engineering days, I'd agree with this. IF we have spent a good amount of time talking and IF there is an affirmation of "we WILL review this code with you" (not just "if we like what we see, then we'll talk"), then I'd -consider- it.

If your idea of hiring is to spam me after I apply in Workday with a multi hour coding project to see if I merit the time speaking to even a recruiter, no, that job app is going in my circular file.