As something of a counterpoint, a literal 4-hour assignment isn't that bad--especially as an alternative to a day of interviews. If they give you the assignment and it's immediately obvious that it's actually a 20+ hour assignment, you can always just walk.
When I worked for a technology analyst company, we would ask for writing samples--which most potential hires would already have. But, if someone didn't, they'd have to create one. It was very reasonably a non-negotiable requirement given that's what they'd be doing day to day.
No it's not. When i do interviews in-person (even if virtual) , I get the benefit of meeting my future colleagues and learning more about the company. It's much more a two-way benefit, versus an assignment where only one party (the company) gets any information from the other (me).
> When I worked for a technology analyst company, we would ask for writing samples--which most potential hires would already have. But, if someone didn't, they'd have to create one. It was very reasonably a non-negotiable requirement given that's what they'd be doing day to day.
The equivalent in tech is asking for a portfolio, which I have an ample amount of on github. I'm more than happy to hand this over to potential employers for them to gauge my work. But, the idea that I could complete a 4hour assignment within a week is ridiculous. My portfolio comes through constant, marginal improvements that make up a working system in sum. I've collectively spent more than 4 hours on most projects on GitHub, but they're done at my leisure, in my miniscule amounts of spare time, just spread over many years. But again, the idea of spending a solid four hours on any of them is just laughable. I have no time to do that.
Also, when you get to full day interviews, it's typically a sign the company wants you. Having been in both the hiring manager position and the candidate position, I've only once seen a full day interview end in a "No" and it was for particular circumstance.
> It's much more a two-way benefit, versus an assignment where only one party (the company) gets any information from the other (me).
> The equivalent in tech is asking for a portfolio, which I have an ample amount of on github. I'm more than happy to hand this over to potential employers for them to gauge my work. But, the idea that I could complete a 4hour assignment within a week is ridiculous.
These two statements made me think of something. Usually, (and from comments I've seen many times on HN) I'll hand in my resumé and it has my Github etc, and the hiring team don't really look at it. Perhaps if I'm given a coding test or assignment, I should pick one of my projects and ask them to complete an open issue, so that I can gauge their coding ability and how they use Git, respond in issues etc?
Fair's fair, and it would tell me a lot more than I get to know right now.
> The equivalent in tech is asking for a portfolio, which I have an ample amount of on github. I'm more than happy to hand this over to potential employers for them to gauge my work.
I don't have a very large open source portfolio, but I it's probably bigger than 95% of the people I work with, I don't think my open source work is particularly representative of my abilities.
Companies want to have a somewhat standardized hiring process so that they can evaluate candidates fairly, and most professional developers people don't do much open source work.
Someone having an impressive open source portfolio, might be a good signal that they are a great hire, but I don't think it's a good general strategy for hiring.
Your last point is the most salient for me- I might be willing to do a long coding assignment if I’m already confident that the company has invested time in evaluating me individually and that an offer is likely, but I’m disinterested if I don’t believe I’m at a 30% chance or greater of getting an offer.
I’ve seen a lot of full-day (realistically 4-5 hours) interviews end in a no-offer. This is obviously true for one-of-one positions (CISO and other singletons), but even for one-of-several, candidates sometime bomb.
> As something of a counterpoint, a literal 4-hour assignment isn't that bad--especially as an alternative to a day of interviews.
As a counter counterpoint, that only makes sense if the candidate is applying to a single place.
If the candidate has lined up 4 interviews, they're not going to get 16 hours in the week to complete them. The fifth place that has no 4 hour interviews will get the candidate.
What sucks though is when companies say 4 hours but then give extra credit to projects that clearly took more than 4 hours.
I did a take home project for Netflix that didn't have a time box IIRC - but something like "no more than a few hours". The task was to code a few movie poster carousels w/o using a web framework. Basically to create your own mini-higher level framework paradigm from vanilla JS or a low-level framework like JQuery.
I spent 7 hours on it and was fairly proud of it. I got dinged for not creating a virtual DOM and instead using the actual DOM as a source of truth. I even put in my notes (which I don't think were read) that in the real world you'd probably use a virtual DOM for this, but that would be a whole project in itself. Apparently I was supposed to spend the whole weekend creating React from scratch.
This is maybe overly cynical, but maybe they want people who say (to themselves, if nothing else) they did 10 hours of work in a few hours? Easy to keep people feeling inadequate and working overtime for free.
This kind of frustration is what got me into writing open source. I wanted an open body of work to point to that I could reuse from one employer to the next that proved I knew wtf I was doing.
It also let me weed out the weirdly numerous companies who threw 8 hour assignments over the wall but apparently lacked the time to spend 10 minutes looking at my open source projects.
The last time I was actively looking for a job (instead of being recruited via my network), was in 2016. Looking at my spreadsheet, I was somewhere in the process of interviewing (phone screen -> in person -> waiting for an offer) for 15 different companies. Why would I ever have jumped through hoops if they were all paying about the same.
I took the first one that met my compensation/technology/commute requirements. Back then, one Enterprise CRUD job looked like any other.
I agree, but "loyalty" doesn't sound like the right word.
If a company demands you run an arbitrarily long and unpleasant obstacle course without any goal or criteria just because they asked you, what they are looking for is subservience.
As something of a counterpoint, a literal 4-hour assignment isn't that bad--especially as an alternative to a day of interviews.
On a relative scale that might be true. In absolute terms you've already lost a high proportion of good senior people who might otherwise have been interested either way. Most good developers I know would just walk on seeing a 4-hour assignment that was actually a 4-hour assignment. Some would accept a full day of interviews if the employer had a reputation for being a good place to work and offered exceptional compensation but plenty wouldn't and I doubt any would for an employer that wasn't very top tier. Risk/reward and all that.
To be honest, at some point if someone wants to work at Google and can get a job at Google--especially if the name and/or the salary is what they really care about--it's probably in the best interest of a lot of companies to just move on.
I'm sure that's true but another point I was trying to make there was that IME even top tier companies exclude a significant proportion of good developers by having excessive hiring processes. The kind of applicant who could get hired by those companies doesn't have to put up with those processes and at least here in the UK the pay at even top tier companies with annoying hiring processes isn't so much better than everyone else that it's worth the sacrifice.
In the US, there's probably a pretty significant delta between top SV big tech salaries and a lot of the rest. Of course, those companies probably exclude a lot of competent developers and other companies can offer other opportunities besides just salary that big tech can't (more interesting projects, less of a hiring gauntlet, smaller scale, etc.) But if someone is willing to and can get through the hiring gauntlet--and really cares about the comp--it's hard to compete.
> When I worked for a technology analyst company, we would ask for writing samples--which most potential hires would already have. But, if someone didn't, they'd have to create one.
I have a github/gitlab full of code. You want to check it? Go for it. Happy to provide a portfolio on demand.
I'm with you on this. If you don't have a repo you can share, then a take home exercise seems like a reasonable alternative. Its about being respectful on peoples time, while still recognising the need to 'validate' claims of experience.
I didn’t have any open source work from 1996-2020. What I did have was the an active network and the ability to dig deep when asked about my prior projects/accomplishments.
If I ever pivoted back to pure software development and wanted to get a comparably compensated position at a large tech company would a jump through the DS&A grind - yes. But to work for a startup that offered meh compensation and meaningless “equity” - no.
> As something of a counterpoint, a literal 4-hour assignment isn't that bad--especially as an alternative to a day of interviews.
_The_ alternative is not a day of interviews. There are in fact, an innumerable number of alternatives. One alternative is to simply drop the assignment entirely from the interview process (without replacement) and judging by what's left.
IME, the 4 hour assignment comes at the 'coding interview' stage, and most companies have a full day of interviews right after. Compared to companies with a one hour coding screen... by the time I even would get to the 4 hour assignment I likely already have three or four ful day interviews lined up
> IME, the 4 hour assignment comes at the 'coding interview' stage, and most companies have a full day of interviews right after.
This is not true at all. I know for a fact that some FANGs do hour-long phone screens followed by hour-long coding assignments followed by a 4-hour multi-interview round. I know for a fact that a couple of major Fintech companies do hour-long phone screens followed by a hour-long live coding sessions.
Personally, the max I endured was a 7-round hiring process comprised of a mix of one-hour interviews that culminated in a 4-hour interview round, and that was only because midway through I was bumped from a developer position track to a research engineer position.
> As something of a counterpoint, a literal 4-hour assignment isn't that bad--especially as an alternative to a day of interviews.
No, it's really bad. It's half-day of useless, unpaid work which takes time other things you need/have to do.
Never in my career I had to endure a day of interviews. Even FANGS don't do days of interviews, even the ones notorious for their awful working conditions. At most, there is the final 4-hour interview/test round, and even that is too much.
I'd say that these hoop-jumping obstacle courses are major red flags. If a company is really interested in getting you to join their team, why do they show so little consideration for you with all these arbitrary, capricious demands?
If I'm looking at one place, I'd agree with you. As a senior I get multiple companies interested in me. If I want to evaluate 8 different positions (not unreasonable with somebody of decades of experience), you're asking me to invest 32 hours in your simple 4 hour test.
When I worked for a technology analyst company, we would ask for writing samples--which most potential hires would already have. But, if someone didn't, they'd have to create one. It was very reasonably a non-negotiable requirement given that's what they'd be doing day to day.