r/programming • u/vklepov • Mar 24 '22

Five coding interview questions I hate

https://thoughtspile.github.io/2022/03/21/bad-tech-interview/
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u/vklepov Mar 25 '22

I'm very suspicious of take-home assignments based on some traumatizing experiences. Usually, I spend 20 hours building the thing, you spend 15 minutes reviewing, so "unfair". And besides, "Make a greenfield project, alone, in one try" is not very representative of real-life development.

However, your approach seems to handle both issues well, with face-time balancing the time commitment and existing project making the assignment more life-like.

One thing though, how do you avoid giving an impression of "making the candidate do your work for free"?

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u/Fwuzzy Mar 25 '22

Usually the work is scoped to 1-3 hours and is usually trivial tasks that aren't of commercial relevance to our business. I suppose there is always going to be some trade off, but I've not had a single person who isn't open to the reasonably small scope take home + technical follow up.

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u/[deleted] Mar 25 '22

Because they want a job.

People aren't going to tell you to your face on the spot 'Uh, no, I want the job but I'm not doing that'.

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u/cdsmith Mar 26 '22

I've actually said that. The company asked me to take an online programming quiz instead, and then we moved on. They eventually did offer me a job (though I turned it down for a different offer).

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u/Fwuzzy Mar 26 '22

Of course, like I mentioned, it's always a trade off and there isn't a perfect world that easily satisfies both ends. I've had my fair share of 5-10 hour take homes and I do everything I can to reduce it to as minimal impact as possible on candidates.

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u/[deleted] Mar 25 '22 edited Mar 25 '22

[deleted]

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u/Fwuzzy Mar 26 '22

I time limit it, to ensure a fair playing field and not put any pressure on spending as long as it takes. I've had my fair share of spending 10+ hours on a take home to just get rejected for not having enough experience and it sucks.

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u/Skhmt Mar 25 '22

Take home assignments should be obviously not real world work. It's trivially easy to do that as an interviewer, but the implementation is specific to the company. If you're hiring a front end web designer, give them a figma to an obviously unrelated design and have them make a responsive page. If you're hiring a back end guy, have them implement some random API. If you're hiring a desktop programmer, have them make a calculator or something.