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I took a take-home assignment from fly.io a while back; they promised that every completion would receive real human feedback. As far as I remember, I was told
by martinohansen 3y ago
I took a take-home assignment from fly.io a while back; they promised that every completion would receive real human feedback.
As far as I remember, I was told it would take a few hours, maybe 4, but the assignment looked rather fun, so I thought, whatever, let’s do it.
Maybe I didn't understand the assignment fully or missed some cues; I don't know. But it took me roughly 10 hours spread across two days. After 5-6 hours, you don't feel like throwing the work away; you just want to finish. It was pretty frustrating.
After returning the assignment, I waited the two weeks they asked for and heard nothing. I sent one email, waited a week, got no reply, sent another, waited some more, and still received no reply. I ended up sending a handful of emails to various addresses I could find. I even sent a DM on Twitter to one of the founders to let them know. No reply anywhere.
Overall, it was a pretty bad experience.
- shakes_mcjunkie 3y agoThat's very frustrating, I'm sorry you had that experience. The most time I've spent is ~4 hours and I've definitely gotten to that point where I'm like I don't know if it's worth it but I should just finish it. And yea, to not get anything back from the reviewer/recruiter after that just feels bad.
- bicx 3y agoDamn, I thought fly.io was better than that.
- sosodev 3y agoI did a fly hiring project and was simply told I wasn’t good enough to move on. Zero explanation as to why. I found it very frustrating too.
- lloydatkinson 3y agoSimilar experience with DuckDuckGo - except I didn’t get past their bullshit first part which was “write 7 pages describing a project you designed in the last year”. They claimed it would take only a couple of hours but for the 15 or so bullet point requirements that was simply not realistic. Spent a couple of days on it and the only feedback I got was no thanks. They had previously stated they pay for every stage regardless of outcome. After sending my details they never paid me. Feels vastly hypocritical given their stated people first work culture.
- CoastalCoder 3y agoIf you have documentation of that, you might enjoy suing th om small claims court.
- lloydatkinson 3y agoIs there any point though really? For 100USD while I’m in the UK probably adds even more paperwork
- CoastalCoder 3y ago> Is there any point though really? I really meant the "you might enjoy" part. I wasn't suggesting it's an efficient way to make money. Some people are really bothered by misdeads going unpunished.
- odshoifsdhfs 3y agoI had the same experience with DDG, but I will say I did get paid the 300 dollars or so (by PayPal) they promised.
- flashgordon 3y agoYou should just share it or create a "leetcode" site for takehome assignments!! Shameful that these companies think so little of your time! Don't get me wrong if you had fun (and I enjoy them too) nothing wrong with that.
- yieldcrv 3y agoI just add them to my open source portfolio on github and make it look like I love side projects I also use them as starting points for the next take home assignment and even live interviews (I’ve been able to keep the project open in the IDE on a separate monitor and copy and paste code even when doing a camera-on + screenshare interview)
- flashgordon 3y agoNice. Keep up the good fight mate!
- mrkurt 3y agoThis is the one: https://github.com/fly-hiring/infraops-challenge https://github.com/fly-hiring/infraops-challenge Here's another: https://github.com/fly-hiring/platform-challenge https://github.com/fly-hiring/platform-challenge
- theideaofcoffee 3y agoThe poor communication roughly mirrors my experience there as well. I had expressed interest in one of their infrastructure operations positions and was given access to the repo with the project after a wait of about a week to hear back. Due to some life events I wasn’t able to start looking at the project in earnest for about another week, whereupon I had some questions. So I sent questions to the individual that originally contacted me. Never heard back. Was it my issue waiting a short time to start it? Maybe, but you’d think they’d at least try to answer a question or two. Oh well, I just gave up because if they weren’t going to put in any time, why should I?
- marcell 3y agoIf you want some feedback email me and I’ll check your work. I don’t work at Fly.io but I have over a decade of backend experience including Google, Apple, etc. If they said it would take 4 hours and you spent 10 hours on it, it’s likely your approach was ineffective compared to a more skilled engineer.
- EMM_386 3y ago> If they said it would take 4 hours and you spent 10 hours on it, it’s likely your approach was ineffective compared to a more skilled engineer. They promised this person if they completed it, they would get an actual human response back. Not only did they not get a response back, they didn't get a response back from anybody, even when directly trying to follow-up. And this was what was promised for spending 4 hours of your time on something. At the very least, that seems unfair.
- triyambakam 3y agoI'm doubtful. In my experience the hour requirement hours number is under estimated.
- ornornor 3y agoIn my experience, the number of hours the company suggests is always BS. It takes 2–3x as much time to experiment and then polish your solution. It might take the states amount of time if you’re the person who came up with the problem and knows how to solve it right away because you’ve put much thought into it and have seen dozens or hundreds of solutions already.
- bruce511 3y agoThe context is also radically different. Let's say I come up with an assignment and I pass it to a junior to see how long it takes. The junior does the work, likely reports the time rounded down, but also with no stakes. Jim job is secure. As an interviewee you're gonna spend time polishing the code. Every variable well named, lots of comments, good functions, well considered parameter order etc. It's gonna take longer because , for you, the stakes are higher. You'll likely build some code to test it, and so on. This is before we discuss domain knowledge that the junior had, and also that the company implemented the task in the first place and didn't just spitball the time expected.
- Kostic 3y agoI had pretty good experience interviewing with Fly, on the other hand. The most fun task I had so far, the feedback was pretty good as well. Kudos to tptacek for that. Maybe they had bad experience with sharing feedback directly?
- nindalf 3y agoEveryone thinks they’re going to give feedback because “we’re different, we’re going to do this right”. Then life happens and that shit gets dropped by the wayside.
- 111111IIIIIII 3y ago> Then life happens and that shit gets dropped by the wayside. Correction: It's not profitable.
- pydry 3y agoCompanies also start worrying about getting humiliated by their interviewers. The less feedback they give the less embarrassing it is likely to be.
- roughly 3y agoReplace “humiliated” with “sued”. At the core of everything people-related a company does or does not do is the fear of a lawsuit, and in the case of interviewees, the only thing that leads to a lawsuit is telling the interviewee anything at all - therefore, no feedback.
- pydry 3y agoNo, replace "sued" with "humiliated". Every time. It just sounds more prudent to say "legal risk" than "we're worried a member of staff will make us look like absolute morons" or "we're lazy". It's obvious when you think about it. "We didnt hire her because she seemed like she might get pregnant" isnt the kind of feedback most people write anyway and if they did a 2 minute pass via HR is enough to eliminate the risk. The companies that are actually worried take pains to tell you what not to say during the interview. This is rarer than you'd think. Most companies aren't actually that worried about getting sued over interviews. That doesnt stop them from tossing this lame excuse at you though.
- 111111IIIIIII 3y ago
- avinoth 3y agoMirrors my experience. The job listing promised mountains and that it will take few hours and they’ll take time in their feedback,etc. except i just got a generic reply that “we’re not satisfied with the solution”. For something that took ~10 hours, i was at the least expecting a vague pointers on whys. I even sent an one pager explaining style decisions, caveats, etc. It was pretty insulting. And when asked for a follow up, got a more generic bs about how the evaluation criteria is honed from their years of experience and that is not something they share outside. One good thing that is it made me realise interviewing still sucks and i just stopped looking for jobs.
- mrkurt 3y agoI went and looked at your submission, and I am comfortable with how we handled it and the level of detail we gave you. Would you mind sending me an email so I can hear a bit more? It sounds like we might've implied something we didn't mean to. These should not take 10 hours, unless you're learning Rails from scratch or something (some people do this). We've tried different ways of saying "don't spend more than 2 hours on this unless you really want to" and it doesn't always come through.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- b20000 3y agoshouldn’t take more than x hours - if i had a dime for every time i heard that…
- mrkurt 3y agoIf it takes more than 2 hours, there's a pretty good chance it's the wrong job for the person doing the challenge.
- solarmist 3y agoAnd for every company that means it there are five others want to find people that will sink massive amounts of time into these so they can do the same once they start.
- mrkurt 3y agoHi Martin: I'm really sorry we ghosted you. That's not good, and it's happened more often than I'd like. We struggled with this in March, especially, because we were dealing with reliability issues. I'll make sure we get you a response within the next week.
- Solvency 3y agoIt's hilarious watching the CEO here trying to do damage control in a highly visible setting after so many burnt programmers emerge to tell their tales.
- mrkurt 3y agoI hope my responses don't come across as damage control. Talking through this stuff is super valuable, we tweak our hiring process almost continuously based on feedback. Sometimes when people have a bad experience, we've just fucked up. Other times, we set the wrong expectations and there are simple improvements we can make. I doubt anyone will read frustrated comments and my responses and think "oh boy, I didn't want to apply there but that one guy responded and made me change my mind".
- lapcat 3y ago> Talking through this stuff is super valuable, we tweak our hiring process almost continuously based on feedback. Isn't that ironic, indeed hypocritical? You take feedback from job applicants, consider it super valuable, but refuse to give anything useful to those very job applicants.
- b20000 3y agoleetcode costs you at least 20 hours per month and you don’t create anything you own
- theLastOfCats 3y agoHad a similar experience in Klarna, but I they returned with feedback. Feedback was something like "Assignment is private and you can't store code on GitHub, you should send zip archive"