[giancarlostoro]

Might as well pick a name from a hat and hire someone out of those 30 people, and just tell no one that's how you picked them. At least then you wouldn't be wasting their precious time they could be looking at other jobs for.

[filoleg]

Reminds me of the old joke about shuffling the stack of candidate resumes multiple times and then picking the top 3 (and throwing away the rest), because you wouldn’t want to hire unlucky people.

[giancarlostoro]

Hah that's great, I'm mostly joking, but like, at the same time, having spent months not finding anything, I'd rather hear that it's not happening sooner than be strung along. Don't make me do a project if I'm not getting any compensation for my efforts. Time is money, and some of us are not making any whatsoever when job hunting.

[filoleg]

Oh, absolutely agreed.

I remember back in college thinking that take-home project assessments were great (as a candidate). Even after getting fleeced on those a few times (e.g., spent a week completing the assessment, everything seemed picture perfect, submitted it, waited a week, automatic rejection with zero feedback or explanation, wtf?).

These days, I would rather go through 5-6 rounds of leetcode+systems design interviews. Takes much less time, each one gets easier and faster, and zero extra overhead with each subsequent interview (while with take-home projects, each one will take around the same amount of time). And I am not even gonna dive into the whole cheating issue with take-home projects.

I simply got other things in life at this point that I would rather do, than to spend over 10 hours in a week on a single take-home project, while i can spend that exact same number of hours to complete ~2 full leetcode-centric interview loops at 2 different companies. And that’s not even mentioning that take-home project interviews also have leetcode and other rounds as follow-ups anyway. As well as the whole “the company doesn’t care about this being easily cheatable” attitude with take-home projects not really making me want to work there (acting as a weak proxy for the general quality of candidates they are hiring).

P.S. I think of leetcode as the best lowest common denominator. Yes, there are certain niche interview processes that are very one-of-a-kind that are great, but they are imo not easily transportable outside of the company conducting those. The one that came to my mind personally was Dropbox (the whole process from start to finish was fantastic, and they treated candidates like reasonable adults, no lowballing on offers or any other bs), with one specific round being “prepare to discuss any project you worked on before in depth, and a week ahead of it send a very short 1-2 paragraph description of what the project is to your interviewer.” It was one of the best interviews I ever had in my entire life (not talking about my performance on it, but rather in terms of how in-depth it went and how just great it felt to talk all that systems design and decision-making).

P.P.S. Another one I can think of is Netflix, but I didn’t interview there myself yet. A couple friends of mine did, and apparently there was almost no code involved at any point there (no leetcode, no take home projects, nothing). 3 years later, those firends are still at Netflix and seem to be loving it, so Netflix definitely did something right there.