8 ms·

Its good in theory, but it leaves a lot of ambiguity for the interviewee to parse through. For instance, if given a two week window would it look better for me

Its good in theory, but it leaves a lot of ambiguity for the interviewee to parse through. For instance, if given a two week window would it look better for me to do it tonight? Would it show ambition? Or would it seem like I'm desperate, and lead to a lower amount of compensation being offered to me? Should I spend far longer then five hours on the assignment, and turn in superior work while making it seem like I only spent 5 hours? What is my competition doing? As someone who's recently been through the ringer, including one six hour take-home, all I want is a clear demonstration of respect and rationality. Bring me into your professional office. Let's talk like professionals. Allow me to demonstrate my professional skills. Call me back with a professional yes or a professional no, all within a professional time frame. That's it. Remote or otherwise less traditional assignments / roles / jobs will deserve and benefit from their own process. But how we strayed from the straight forward formula is beyond me, my guess it was an initiative started by a handful of companies who had trouble hiring. I don't think hiring devs is the systematic issue everyone makes it out to be. Assessing talent is always hard, be it an artist's, an athlete's or a programmers. I think rather then assume the cost of the investment in hiring, companies chose to blame the system and that's where this absurd roller coaster started.

totalrobe 11y ago
Good points. If you really care about being impartial, maybe have the 2 week period and a blind submission method in which the interviewer does not see when the assignment was completed.
- bjones22 11y ago
  But my rent is due the Friday after next and I need to know if I should send out another wave of resumes. It isn't but it strikes me we are looking very hard to find a new way to do things, when the old way was pretty damn good. Sit me down and talk about technology for ~thirty minutes. If I don't have the social skills to successfully do this (minority issue) I likely would not be able to communicate well with a team and thus should not be a candidate anyways. You will then know immediately whether you want to hire me (or progress me to another round) or not. I then get a call two days later and can progress with my life. People pretend like all this hiring strategy is for the good of the candidate. It's not. As with everything else its for the good of the company and its investors. Here's a thought: Invest in a competent hiring manager who can see through applicant bull shit and identify talent within a reasonable range. Includes basic negotiation skills. And assume the rightful risk that is employing another human being.
  - lordnacho 11y ago
    >Invest in a competent hiring manager who can see through applicant bull shit and identify talent within a reasonable range. Includes basic negotiation skills. And assume the rightful risk that is employing another human being. Problem with that is it's hard to find one. It's gotta be someone with pretty good coding skills. This person would then have to share their time between either coding head-down or managing coders, either of which are time-consuming and intolerant of disruption. One idea I had was you could have mutual feedback. A bunch of people would after a while have anonymous input on each other, giving you say 10 coder's impressions of a fellow coder. This wouldn't have to be quizzes, half hour coffees could do.
  - dpark 11y ago
    > Sit me down and talk about technology for ~thirty minutes. This is an efficient way to hire a team of good bullshitters. I've interviewed people who did extremely well when we were "talking like professionals" but were unable to do even very simple coding problems. My bar for coding is really not that high. I don't expect perfect syntax. I don't pick the language. I don't expect "the one answer". I expect people to write code that could work after syntax and small bugs are fixed, and most critically, I expect people to be able to discuss their code meaningfully. Unfortunately, "ability to write basic code" and "ability to talk like professionals" are not tightly correlated. And I expect both of these things from dev candidates.
    - vonmoltke 11y ago
      I disagree. I have yet to meet anyone who is faking it and cannot be cracked in 5-10 minutes of carefully-directed prodding. In fact, I don't see how it is possible to do extremely well on the "talk like a professional" part and not be able to write basic programs, unless you and I have very different concepts of what "talk like a professional" means.
      - brianwawok 11y ago
        I worked with a team of these before. You can rule our certain types of people with tech questions (i.e. never coded before, only coded hacked, etc.). You cannot rule out * People who read a lot of blogs so know the lingo, but never code * People who get the theory but can't actually implement something that works without bugs * People that over-engineer simple things
PhasmaFelis 11y ago
> Bring me into your professional office. Let's talk like professionals. Allow me to demonstrate my professional skills. Call me back with a professional yes or a professional no, all within a professional time frame. That's it. What if your professional skills are such that it's not possible to demonstrate them in an hour or two at someone else's office--either because of the nature of the skills, or because you're one of the many excellent programmers whose work suffers when there's someone actively staring at you, like the guy in the article? Let's be honest. Programming as a discipline attracts a disproportionate number of people for whom social skills do not come easily. Granted, you don't want to hire a grumbling misanthrope who refuses to take direction, but you also don't want to turn away a perfectly good team player who lacks the largely irrelevant skill of gladhanding under pressure. I think a lot of the comments in discussions like this come from programmers who do have solid social skills, and there's certainly nothing wrong with that, but an interview process that gives you personally a fair evaluation is not necessarily the most reliable one for programmers in general.

totalrobe 11y ago

Good points. If you really care about being impartial, maybe have the 2 week period and a blind submission method in which the interviewer does not see when the assignment was completed.

bjones22 11y ago
But my rent is due the Friday after next and I need to know if I should send out another wave of resumes. It isn't but it strikes me we are looking very hard to find a new way to do things, when the old way was pretty damn good. Sit me down and talk about technology for ~thirty minutes. If I don't have the social skills to successfully do this (minority issue) I likely would not be able to communicate well with a team and thus should not be a candidate anyways. You will then know immediately whether you want to hire me (or progress me to another round) or not. I then get a call two days later and can progress with my life. People pretend like all this hiring strategy is for the good of the candidate. It's not. As with everything else its for the good of the company and its investors. Here's a thought: Invest in a competent hiring manager who can see through applicant bull shit and identify talent within a reasonable range. Includes basic negotiation skills. And assume the rightful risk that is employing another human being.
- lordnacho 11y ago
  >Invest in a competent hiring manager who can see through applicant bull shit and identify talent within a reasonable range. Includes basic negotiation skills. And assume the rightful risk that is employing another human being. Problem with that is it's hard to find one. It's gotta be someone with pretty good coding skills. This person would then have to share their time between either coding head-down or managing coders, either of which are time-consuming and intolerant of disruption. One idea I had was you could have mutual feedback. A bunch of people would after a while have anonymous input on each other, giving you say 10 coder's impressions of a fellow coder. This wouldn't have to be quizzes, half hour coffees could do.
- dpark 11y ago
  > Sit me down and talk about technology for ~thirty minutes. This is an efficient way to hire a team of good bullshitters. I've interviewed people who did extremely well when we were "talking like professionals" but were unable to do even very simple coding problems. My bar for coding is really not that high. I don't expect perfect syntax. I don't pick the language. I don't expect "the one answer". I expect people to write code that could work after syntax and small bugs are fixed, and most critically, I expect people to be able to discuss their code meaningfully. Unfortunately, "ability to write basic code" and "ability to talk like professionals" are not tightly correlated. And I expect both of these things from dev candidates.
  - vonmoltke 11y ago
    I disagree. I have yet to meet anyone who is faking it and cannot be cracked in 5-10 minutes of carefully-directed prodding. In fact, I don't see how it is possible to do extremely well on the "talk like a professional" part and not be able to write basic programs, unless you and I have very different concepts of what "talk like a professional" means.
    - brianwawok 11y ago
      I worked with a team of these before. You can rule our certain types of people with tech questions (i.e. never coded before, only coded hacked, etc.). You cannot rule out * People who read a lot of blogs so know the lingo, but never code * People who get the theory but can't actually implement something that works without bugs * People that over-engineer simple things

PhasmaFelis 11y ago

> Bring me into your professional office. Let's talk like professionals. Allow me to demonstrate my professional skills. Call me back with a professional yes or a professional no, all within a professional time frame. That's it. What if your professional skills are such that it's not possible to demonstrate them in an hour or two at someone else's office--either because of the nature of the skills, or because you're one of the many excellent programmers whose work suffers when there's someone actively staring at you, like the guy in the article? Let's be honest. Programming as a discipline attracts a disproportionate number of people for whom social skills do not come easily. Granted, you don't want to hire a grumbling misanthrope who refuses to take direction, but you also don't want to turn away a perfectly good team player who lacks the largely irrelevant skill of gladhanding under pressure. I think a lot of the comments in discussions like this come from programmers who do have solid social skills, and there's certainly nothing wrong with that, but an interview process that gives you personally a fair evaluation is not necessarily the most reliable one for programmers in general.