I think I’ve decided I don’t like take home projects for job interviews, even if they pay you. They don’t respect the interviewees time and there’s no communication.
An on-site usually takes like four hours, and after a combination of whiteboarding/coding/discussion, you’re done.
All of these companies doing take-home projects have like a four or five part process where they expect you to spend five to eight hours on each part.
@collin it is what I would do if I had to be a CEO in the modern economy and wanted to stay a CEO. There is unfortunately not much room for humanity at the top in a shareholder value driven system.
@collin it’s the level below senior. I’d be more than happy to give a reference and put your resume in the system if you’d like! But I am quite sure it’s not going to be the pay you expect or deserve.
@collin@RobW my worst experience was with a prominent open source encrypted messaging service who asked me to do a fully featured app with networking, fancy UI, persistence etc… and then couldn’t make up their minds so asked me to do another fully featured app to get more (ahem) signal!
@collin eh, I generally refuse them outright unless there’s a clear purpose or criteria. if they agree to an hourly rate I’ll consider it, but generally I propose “save us both the hassle, look at GitHub” to sidestep the issue
@notjosh maybe I should put more stuff and GitHub. Some people seem to have a talent for seeing pieces that can be easily pulled out or having ideas for things to invent out of nowhere.
@collin (or more constructively: if it’s near to the end of the process to see some specific skills in a candidate, that’s much different to a hiring manager asking for a code sample as a first step. sooo much is the latter)
And from what I’ve seen, the success rate for the company isn’t any better with take home than an on-site.
If they are basically equally effective, I would much rather spend one day than like 30 hours, especially if the end result of either could be not getting hired.
@antokne I keep getting asked to do things like spend six to eight hours writing a technical specification before moving onto a six hour coding project. It’s just too much and it doesn’t result in better hires.
@antokne maybe give people an option? Clearly different people succeed in different ways. We both seem like solid engineers a company would be lucky to hire, but it sounds like depending on the interview style, it’d be easy for us to fall through the cracks.
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