[tptacek]

Adding take-home problems to a traditional 4-6 hour interview loop is odious.

But the "way more than 4 hours" thing smuggles in a premise: that every candidate should be able to finish the challenge in the allotted time. But candidates with greater aptitude or conversance with the problem domain will complete work sample tests faster than candidates without, and selecting for those candidates is the point of hiring qualification.

[michaelt]

It depends on the details of the work sample test.

If I ask you to write me a python function to convert OSGB easting/northing into WGS84 longitude/latitude the task has a very clearly defined scope. If you knock it out in a quarter of the allotted 4 hours, you've saved time. You can't use the remaining time to go further and demonstrate your mastery.

On the other hand if I ask you to write me a website for organising photos, there's no such thing as 'done' - no matter how good you are, after 4 hours you'll still be able to think of ways to make it faster, more beautiful, more featureful, more scalable, cheaper to operate, etc

Obviously, as a hiring manager I'll notice if you've spent 40 hours on the 4 hour task - but if you've spent 6 hours maybe I just think you're a fast worker with relevant experience and sharp tools. And my sense of how far you can get is calibrated by other prospective hires; if lots of people are spending 6 hours and claiming to have spent 4, my expectations will naturally be high.

[tptacek]

Again, the premise is that you're exercising professional judgement. If you can't let a project go until it's perfect to a standard far past what's called for, that is itself signal. Either way: if the project budgets 4 hours, it is on you as a professional to stop at 4 hours.

[lesam]

If you run an interview process where candidates who take 6-8 hours and claim to have taken 4 hours score highest, those are the candidates you will hire.

[tptacek]

All these objections rely on removing agency from the professionals applying for jobs. You look at the work sample. You use your professional judgement. You decide if it's reasonable to execute it to what you think a professional standard would be in the time allotted. You make a decision.

This isn't a college application.

[akerl_]

I think you're answering a different objection than they're making. Their concern is that people will choose to spend 8 hours on your 4 hour problem but then tell you they only spent 4. Then you'll think they're a leet hacker because their solution is so awesome and they did it so fast.

[tptacek]

Why would I think that? There's a rubric for the challenge defined up front, before anyone does it.

[lesam]

Why would you design a hiring process that scores unprofessional people (by your own definition) higher than professional ones?

[tptacek]

Again: I am responsive to the concern that hiring processes can demand too much of candidates, and particularly to the idea that work-sample challenges are unreasonably demanding compared to interviews. That's why hiring processes I've designed over the last 10 years have all been budgeted against the time typically allotted to an interview loop. And then, to people who say "the challenges take more time than the budget, so I'm forced to spend more time", I say "if you believe that to be the case, don't do the work sample challenge".

The rest of this I'm not interested in. For as long as we've been talking about hiring processes on HN, there have always been staunch defenders of interviews. Lots of people have spent time getting good at them, there are classes on it, there are books, there are drilling exercises. I don't anticipate talking those people out of their investment in interviewing.

[BoiledCabbage]

That's absurd thinking if putting in 6-8 hrs outta what everyone else is doing and what is needed to get you a job.

For all its flaws, part of the benefit of an interview is it's time bound and equal for everyone. Similar to a test.

[tptacek]

Look, if you want to make people do work samples from an uncomfortable conference room at your office, be my guest. I am pretty confident I speak for the majority of candidates when I say that that my preference would strongly be for the ability to work on this stuff from wherever I want to.

[ncallaway]

I mean, that doesn't have to be how it works. You can have a both fixed amount of time, and the ability for a candidate to work in whatever environment they want.

[tptacek]

Of course, and if you want to do that, I've got no complaints. What we want is to eliminate pressure and scheduling inconvenience. We're also not unhappy to meet people who are not necessarily experts in our problem domain, but capable enough programmers that they can ramp up given a bit of extra time. I don't feel the slightest bit bad creating that affordance, so long as you can meet the rubric if you're an experienced professional in the time we allot.

[dpark]

This is theoretically true but it’s also rife with misaligned priorities. The people putting together these take home assignments have little incentive to ensure that they can be completed by a competent engineer in the allotted time. The engineers completing these assignments are definitely incentivized to underreport how long they spent on the assignment.

With AI coding this is also largely useless. These “build this thing in 4 hours” assignments come with a literal prepared prompt so that they can be churned out in 10 minutes.

[tptacek]

We don't ask or check how long candidates take. You're a professional, we give you a challenge, you can decide (up front, 30 minutes in, whatever) whether you're likely to be able to finish in the budgeted time. Maybe you can't because you've got a lunch date and don't have the contiguous block, and want to do it in chunks. Fine by us.

Again, the underlying smuggled premise here is that candidates have to finish the work sample. No they don't. In fact, that's a strong sign it's not an effective work sample. A test that everybody passes isn't a real test; it's just a hazing ritual.

[jaggederest]

Just anecdotally, I can confirm that this method works great - it screened me out by showing me exactly what day to day work was like at your company, and that I was not nearly nerdy enough about specifically containerization to want to do it all day.

So you saved yourself/the team several possible hours of interviewing, and me quite a few hours - I think it took me about 10 to 15 minutes to see what you wanted in an engineer and that I was not it, and a total of 1 email which felt quite automated (whether it was or not) so there was a very low social cost as well.

[dpark]

You are assuming the assignment is reasonable and the candidate is lacking if they cannot complete in the expected time. And for all I know that’s entirely true for you. What I know is that I’ve seen assignments from others where the assignment scope was unreasonable for the allotted time. And for those teams, the filter becomes not so much “is this person capable” but “is this person willing to put up with our shit”, and the teams likely don’t even realize that’s what they’ve done (because they also “don't ask or check how long candidates take”).

> Again, the underlying smuggled premise here is that candidates have to finish the work sample. No they don't. In fact, that's a strong sign it's not an effective work sample. A test that everybody passes isn't a real test; it's just a hazing ritual.

Now this is an interesting take. Usually when people talk about these take home assignments, they talk about assessing the quality of the work. How good is the design? How is the coding? Is it efficient/elegant/whatever?

Here you take a much different approach, saying that the completion itself is the filter. If one person completes your assignment in the allotted 2 hours and another needs 12 but never tells you that, do you not care about that discrepancy?

[tptacek]

We do assess all of those things. Again: you're a professional. We give you a work sample test. You look at it, and use your best professional judgement to decide if it is (a) reasonable and (b) doable in the budgeted time given your capabilities. If either is untrue, you don't do the work sample.

I'm having a real hard time seeing how this isn't strictly better than an interview, which, as the article (and basically everything written in the last year about interviews) points out, is basically a random function.