Why take-home interview assignments are a waste of time

[2rosy]

My condolences on being laid off. It's rough out there for IT folks. You guys do get paid a lot though, so now they're realizing they can't afford to keep all you bastards on the payroll.

So now they gotta decide whehter they should hire John A (not very experienced but trainable but lower salary reqs) or John B (very experienced but expensive).

I mean how do you stand out from thousands of applicants??

Those laid off had titles like
Relationship manager
Product owner
Performance engineer
Seo copywriter
Support specialist
See specialist
Digital advertising specialist
...

 

[VicBee]

Getting laid off is always an emotional rollercoaster. I'm grateful it hasn't happened to me more than a couple of times while in college. But for me the hardest has always been the job interviews. I sucked at them and absolutely hated being judged over my eclectic background, particularly because I was pretty satisfied with my choices which didn't conform to a career pathway. Needless to say, I failed many job interviews, which took a toll on my sense of worth. Ironically, I tended to excel at the jobs I did get, because of my background, thinking outside the proverbial box, asking unexpected questions, providing unusual but workable solutions to difficult problems and being able to work with anyone in the hierarchy, from top to bottom, to understand their perspective, their motivation and their expectations.

 

[M.W.]

Any better suggestion how to evaluate and segregate the capable from thousands of mediocre applicants?

And if you still are asked for such assignments then I greatly overestimated your abilities. Did you not get any recommendations from your former employer(s) and build a pitch book of past projects and code samples? Why would you participate in such low or mid level interviews if you believe you rank above? At some point I never had to undergo quant interview questions and puzzles again after I built myself a solid track record of past performance with previous prop groups.

I recently got thrown (unwillingly) into the interviews market since my employer fired everyone. IT recession is a bitch.

Anyway, there's a type of interview that I loathe: the take-home interview. You have a vaguely defined problem, noone to talk about it with, no criteria for "pass" or "fail" and you're supposed to invest two or three days grinding on it before sending the finite product into the black hole for evaluation. 99% of the times nothing gets out of the black hole, otherwise it wouldn't deserve it's name. The 1% of the time you do receive "feedback" (like I did), is along "not good enough, we decided to move along with someone else". No explanation, no compensation for the time wasted.

Motherfuckers are getting better at wasting your time! Gone are the times when you got a massive hole into your time budget before ever even speaking to a human agent. They figured out the "sunken cost fallacy" soon enough so they play this game. It's standard recruiter "game". They "call" you although it's got zero relevance, because if they get you to spend half an hour into talking with them, you're already invested. Half an hour is gone, is it lost forever or you continue standing in the queue?

View attachment 316458

Because it's always a queue, a very long queue with very low chance of getting anything solved (getting hired). I'm attaching a local meme which refers to interacting with the state bureaucracy, which involves long preparations followed by long standing in lines for the chance to face a disgruntled employee who tells you to fuck off. Translation says:" "When you're feeling down think that right at this moment, someone stands in the queue of a physical bureaucracy office and thinks they have all the required papers upon them!".

So long gone are the times when a machine asked 8 investment hours from you before you even saw a human. This time the UK fuckers had me waste 30 minutes on a HR call, 30 minutes on some "manager" call, 1 hour on a technical evaluation and then only then, fuckers asked for three days of work upon implementing a "homework", all for the chance of working two full time jobs, a developer and a quant, paid $300,000 base + $300,000 bonus in the US, but in my case only getting £30,000.

I wasted an opportunity to tell them to 1: print the homework on a piece of paper, 2: position it below their cruch and between their legs and finally 3: beat if off their dick. Instead of asking them my full rate for 3 days (€750), I actually invested an hour for free into making a proof of concept of the thing they asked, document myself on the algo (first time hear about it), copy best implementation from stackoverflow, test it briefly, build a C++ multithreaded proof of concept around it, zip it, make a Zoom recording on how to compile, build and generally use the whole thing and send it to them. I was also pretty wasted from the day before so maybe my voice in the Zoom recording didn't sound all that rehearsed and I was too exhausted by the end of the hour to record again, with a script this time. Sent them the whole pack, got about a week of ghosting followed by a predictably uninformative "you failed".

Well they can go fuck themselves, if I wasn't already explicit enough on my interaction with them already.

 

[M.W.]

Why?

Ask me in private.

 

[TheDawn]

I recently got thrown (unwillingly) into the interviews market since my employer fired everyone. IT recession is a bitch.

IT recession??? NDX just grew 10% since April?? But anyway...

Anyway, there's a type of interview that I loathe: the take-home interview. You have a vaguely defined problem, noone to talk about it with, no criteria for "pass" or "fail" and you're supposed to invest two or three days grinding on it before sending the finite product into the black hole for evaluation. 99% of the times nothing gets out of the black hole, otherwise it wouldn't deserve it's name. The 1% of the time you do receive "feedback" (like I did), is along "not good enough, we decided to move along with someone else". No explanation, no compensation for the time wasted.

Motherfuckers are getting better at wasting your time! Gone are the times when you got a massive hole into your time budget before ever even speaking to a human agent. They figured out the "sunken cost fallacy" soon enough so they play this game. It's standard recruiter "game". They "call" you although it's got zero relevance, because if they get you to spend half an hour into talking with them, you're already invested. Half an hour is gone, is it lost forever or you continue standing in the queue?

View attachment 316458

Because it's always a queue, a very long queue with very low chance of getting anything solved (getting hired). I'm attaching a local meme which refers to interacting with the state bureaucracy, which involves long preparations followed by long standing in lines for the chance to face a disgruntled employee who tells you to fuck off. Translation says:" "When you're feeling down think that right at this moment, someone stands in the queue of a physical bureaucracy office and thinks they have all the required papers upon them!".

So long gone are the times when a machine asked 8 investment hours from you before you even saw a human. This time the UK fuckers had me waste 30 minutes on a HR call, 30 minutes on some "manager" call, 1 hour on a technical evaluation and then only then, fuckers asked for three days of work upon implementing a "homework", all for the chance of working two full time jobs, a developer and a quant, paid $300,000 base + $300,000 bonus in the US, but in my case only getting £30,000.

I wasted an opportunity to tell them to 1: print the homework on a piece of paper, 2: position it below their cruch and between their legs and finally 3: beat if off their dick. Instead of asking them my full rate for 3 days (€750), I actually invested an hour for free into making a proof of concept of the thing they asked, document myself on the algo (first time hear about it), copy best implementation from stackoverflow, test it briefly, build a C++ multithreaded proof of concept around it, zip it, make a Zoom recording on how to compile, build and generally use the whole thing and send it to them. I was also pretty wasted from the day before so maybe my voice in the Zoom recording didn't sound all that rehearsed and I was too exhausted by the end of the hour to record again, with a script this time. Sent them the whole pack, got about a week of ghosting followed by a predictably uninformative "you failed".

Well they can go fuck themselves, if I wasn't already explicit enough on my interaction with them already.

"Take-home interview"? Wow!! That's something new. So next time don't participate in one. Find out from them what's the interview process, what's exactly involved and if it includes take-home interviews, politely decline and move on to the next one. And also do NOT drink just before your interview, that should help. Be professional during the interview. I mean the interview is supposed to be a showcase of what you can do for the organization that you want to work at. If you can't even be professional enough to not drink for the interview, why would they think you will be professional to not drink on the job?? But at the same time you do have the right to not jump through the hoops if they are unreasonable. I mean if you don't feel take-home interviews are a fair assessment of your skills and knowledge and experience, then don't do it. Go for companies that don't require that in the interview process.

I have another suspicion that these companies might be using your projects that you did during your take-home interviews as their work since there is no way for you to find out whether they incorporated that in their projects. Another reason why you should refuse them. If a company wants to hire you, they should be able to do it just by interviewing you via the standard process. Companies have always done that throughout the ages and have worked out fine.

Good luck! And if nothing works out, there is always freelance work where you can be your own boss! Until you have worked for yourself, you would never realize how much better when you are not working for someone else.

 

[M.W.]

Take home interview questions have been around for over 10 years. Every large tech company conducts them up to certain levels/ranks and for specific jobs, mostly on the development side.

Please don't participate in topics you know nothing about.

IT recession??? NDX just grew 10% since April??



"Take-home interview"? Wow!! That's something new. So next time don't participate in one. Find out from them what's the interview process, what's exactly involved and if it includes take-home interviews, politely decline and move on to the next one. And also do NOT drink just before your interview, that should help. Be professional during the interview. I mean the interview is supposed to be a showcase of what you can do for the organization that you want to work at. If you can't even be professional enough to not drink for the interview, why would they think you will be professional to not drink on the job?? But at the same time you do have the right to not jump through the hoops if they are unreasonable. I mean if you don't feel take-home interviews are a fair assessment of your skills and knowledge and experience, then don't do it. Go for companies that don't require that in the interview process.

I have another suspicion that these companies might be using your projects that you did during your take-home interviews as their work since there is no way for you to find out whether they incorporated that in their projects. Another reason why you should refuse them. If a company wants to hire you, they should be able to do it just by interviewing you via the standard process. Companies have always done that throughout the ages and have worked out fine.

 

[spy]

Interviews, take-home or otherwise, are only a waste if you have something better to do with your time. It's called opportunity cost.

 

[Aquarians]

Interviews, take-home or otherwise, are only a waste if you have something better to do with your time. It's called opportunity cost.

Interviews are a probability game. My target is to maximize probability of getting hired, which means I follow a few rules:

1) No more than a few 10s of candidates on the job. Assuming all candidates are equal (including me), my probability of getting hired is 1 / N where N is the number of candidates. A rule of thumb is that 2 out of 3 candidates are delusional so from 30 candidates you're still left with 10 strong competitors. Only in exceptional cases I would apply to a job that lists 100+ candidates already applying.

2) Never agree to spend my time during the interview process where the interviewer doesn't spend the exact same time as me. There are two offenders to this rule:

• Automated LeetCode / Codility tests. These are the worst. Whole thing is fully automated so they don't even have to spend 5 minutes afterwards to evaluate your work. They just send you a link and expect you to spend one hour on it, at zero cost (in time) for them.
  
• Homework assignments that take more than 1 hour (usually they expect 8 hours+). It takes them some 5 minutes tops on their side to "evaluate" your investment of 8-16 hours.

Reason I refuse these tests is that there's no "friction", or cost to interviewer. If they put the same amount of time as me, there's a strong incentive on their part to keep it short / efficient. Don't do 5 hours of interviews on 100 candidates, because they just don't have so much time to waste from their personnel. So gotta triage the list from 100 to 10-20, reduce time to 1-2 hours, etc. It incentivizes them.

But the situation where they rob you of your time at no cost or very little cost for them is just that: robbery. Plus it's NEVER the really good companies, I dunno like Google or Facebook, where at least you'd be paid decently if you pass. So they can go fuck themselves.

3) No more than 10 interviews without getting the job. If I do 10 interviews and get rejected every time, there's something wrong with my evaluation of the jobs I apply versus competence I bring. So make a pause, study, re-evaluate and after several months start applying again. This of course assumes I already have a job in order to afford this, so far in 20 years it's always been the case.

 

[spy]

Well, if you've decided that participating in the interview process is the best use of your time then approach it any way you see fit.

It's been a long time since I was in the job market but when I left I had only one simple rule... interview the hiring organization as thoroughly as possible; it's always a two way street. The last thing you want is to be stuck working in a lousy outfit.

Interviews are a probability game. My target is to maximize probability of getting hired, which means I follow a few rules:

1) No more than a few 10s of candidates on the job. Assuming all candidates are equal (including me), my probability of getting hired is 1 / N where N is the number of candidates. A rule of thumb is that 2 out of 3 candidates are delusional so from 30 candidates you're still left with 10 strong competitors. Only in exceptional cases I would apply to a job that lists 100+ candidates already applying.

2) Never agree to spend my time during the interview process where the interviewer doesn't spend the exact same time as me. There are two offenders to this rule:

• Automated LeetCode / Codility tests. These are the worst. Whole thing is fully automated so they don't even have to spend 5 minutes afterwards to evaluate your work. They just send you a link and expect you to spend one hour on it, at zero cost (in time) for them.
  
• Homework assignments that take more than 1 hour (usually they expect 8 hours+). It takes them some 5 minutes tops on their side to "evaluate" your investment of 8-16 hours.

Reason I refuse these tests is that there's no "friction", or cost to interviewer. If they put the same amount of time as me, there's a strong incentive on their part to keep it short / efficient. Don't do 5 hours of interviews on 100 candidates, because they just don't have so much time to waste from their personnel. So gotta triage the list from 100 to 10-20, reduce time to 1-2 hours, etc. It incentivizes them.

But the situation where they rob you of your time at no cost or very little cost for them is just that: robbery. Plus it's NEVER the really good companies, I dunno like Google or Facebook, where at least you'd be paid decently if you pass. So they can go fuck themselves.

3) No more than 10 interviews without getting the job. If I do 10 interviews and get rejected every time, there's something wrong with my evaluation of the jobs I apply versus competence I bring. So make a pause, study, re-evaluate and after several months start applying again. This of course assumes I already have a job in order to afford this, so far in 20 years it's always been the case.

 

[TheDawn]

Getting laid off is always an emotional rollercoaster. I'm grateful it hasn't happened to me more than a couple of times while in college. But for me the hardest has always been the job interviews. I sucked at them and absolutely hated being judged over my eclectic background, particularly because I was pretty satisfied with my choices which didn't conform to a career pathway. Needless to say, I failed many job interviews, which took a toll on my sense of worth. Ironically, I tended to excel at the jobs I did get, because of my background, thinking outside the proverbial box, asking unexpected questions, providing unusual but workable solutions to difficult problems and being able to work with anyone in the hierarchy, from top to bottom, to understand their perspective, their motivation and their expectations.

I see being laid off as the opportunity to do something new. When you are slaving 9-5 for a job, when you get home from a long commute, you are totally exhausted. All you want to do is just to eat and then veg out in front of the TV or computer and then go to bed so you can start all over again the next morning. You never have time to actually do things or explore new things that you wanted to do. It's only when you are laid off then you actually have the time to explore and venture out to try something new while ironically looking for jobs for you to go back to slaving for somebody else. It was during a laid-off that I first started trading and I never looked back since. Sure I go back to slaving from time to time when my trading was not working out but I never completely gave up on trading and it was the laid-off that gave me the opportunity otherwise I would've never had that chance if I was actually able to stay on that job.