Tell HN: Interview take home assessments without feedback are frustrating

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.

The 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?

You 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.

I 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)

I 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.

That'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.

Damn, I thought fly.io was better than that.

Takehomes have been ruined as a concept by companies that spam them out before applying a first pass.

I’ve passed interviews at demanding companies like hedge funds, Google, Facebook, Snap. Not once have I “passed” a take home interview even when I know I got the solution correct. Sorry, but I refuse to do them now. Companies need to be able to show a token investment in time with an actual engineer interviewing me for me to be convinced they are actually considering me as a candidate and didn’t just send me a takehome link without any due diligence because it costs them nothing to do so.

> Not once have I “passed” a take home interview

I have had the exact same experience. They have always been a complete waste of time for me and I have since adopted a policy that any takehome challenges = automatic close the loop for me. It's not worth explaining why either. If this is your process and you find it appropriate to offer it as a first option, then it's just not a good fit.

I agree. I'll give you like a 4-to-1 ratio on a takehome assessment, give me a 30 minute phone call with my potential manager or fellow programmer and let me ask some questions and get a feel for the company and culture, then I'll spend a couple hours on your assessment. If not, well, same rate applies, I'll spend 4x0 hours on your assessment.

A nice way to say this is, "I'd be happy to complete this takehome assessment, but it will take a significant amount of time and first I would like a short phone call to ask some questions and get a feel for the company, nothing too long, I just want to make sure we're all on the same page before I spend my time on this. When can we schedule a call?"

I agree with what you're saying here:

> I would like a short phone call to ask some questions and get a feel for the company

I've had some places do behavioral first and others do coding first. I think I'm more onboard with behavioral first because communication a lot of times is more important than raw technical skill. Everyone can save time if you can suss out early on that the person is a bad communicator or bad fit. And generally you can spend time in this interview asking questions about the company.

I get the impression avoiding take homes is becoming standard advice. I hang out in a few communities of engineers (alumni groups etc.) and it's gotten to the point that many people see requiring a take home as a red flag. Not just because of how companies abuse it, but because if basically everyone the company has hired put up with a take home there's a strong chance you don't hire good engineers.

Amazing to me the general attitude here towards take-homes.

I don't know, perhaps it's because I've progressed every interview I've had the opportunity to do a take-home on (and I struggle with most leet-code style whiteboarding interviews) but I've always seen take-homes as an audition for your software development style -- what you deliver in a take-home assessment is what they will use to judge how you'll deliver on the job, plain and simple.

I've only done take homes for companies that I've already passed initial interviews for and generally like the people I've talked to and have favorable impressions of the culture/workplace thus far. I wouldn't do a take-home before that, but I'd do a take-home any day before a leet code grinding thing.

Had one company in local city. They managed to interview almost every Engineer in the market that had skill set. Rejected all of them.

Few months later I got a call asking to interview again as they realized their standards were too high. Not a chance.

> their standards were too high

They could simply be wrong. I've seen people demand the wrong solution. I've seen tests with bad instructions.

Most people are not good at producing test

That's the reason I advise against them.

Unless you are the top company in your bracket, your completion rate will also not be so great for a take-home (people have limited time: they'll sort by how good your company is). Sure they'll do Google's take-home but local business that does local comp/prevailing wages? It's at the bottom of the pile. By the time they get to it, the best candidates will already have an offer from a better company.

That's why I prefer to bring people on-site as soon as possible, and do a little whiteboard (the point being that the candidate must... know how to code!). It's an artificial challenge that's really a pretext to have a technical discussion.

Only time I advise to use take-homes is when you are dealing with a massive number of applicants from institutions that have a poor signal to noise ratio. Bootcamps come to mind. But then you end up with candidates that have the homework done by someone else and it ends up not being a good filter either.

Whiteboards are skewered just as much on HN. Basically every engineer on here is a 10x and every company should be grateful to even be considered.

Apparently we should just review github OSS contributions and how many unit tests they write.

I don’t think whiteboards are bad. People greatly exaggerate their difficulty

Yep. They evaluate the ability to make sound decisions while in tense situations. I don't want to hire people who implode with a bit of pressure.

Is it whiteboarding in general, or being asked to write realistic code on the whiteboard?

Sketch out rough program structure or system design or whatever

Write valid Python to solve some leetcode question

> Apparently we should just review github OSS contributions and how many unit tests they write.

No, but speaking from experience - also don't reach out to senior, employed devs for a role, then waste their time with whiteboard leetcode quizzes to "make sure they aren't fakers or coasting, we have sooo many applicants".

In those cases, a conversation is really more valuable, we aren't interns.

I gladly participate in whiteboard interviews to ensure I will not have senior+ colleagues who are unable to solve them. The fact that intern candidates can solve them is all the more reason to filter out experienced candidates who can't

1. On-site

Are the best developer candidates looking for on-site roles? I don’t know any that prefer an office setting.

2. Whiteboards

Yet another way to test developers on stuff that is unrelated to the work. I don’t even like writing with my hands all that much because I’m on a keyboard all day.

I get into a whiteboard and I am being tested on writing skills, how visual my thought process is, how my handwriting is, how comfortable I am in a public speaking position…all great qualities, but all entirely unrelated to programming in a team.

Is whiteboarding even a realistic exercise in typical multi-office or remote companies? If I’m presenting to coworkers I’m probably on zoom in my development tools right? That’s not a whiteboard.

- writing skills - visualization / explanation skills - speaking to a small group of peers

all of these are _highly_ relevant to programming in a team beyond the senior level

after many unceremonious rejections, the first company that wanted an optional onsite interview hired me, after I went onsite.

so, people want to hire me when they meet me in person, and I can give more inputs of rapport. data point of 1.

> Takehomes have been ruined as a concept by companies that spam them out before applying a first pass.

I had this experience a few weeks ago with Wolverine Trading.

It seemed clear that they didn't respect my time. Perhaps I dodged a bullet.

Not just takehomes but also applies to things like automated coding challenges as an initial step before I've talked with someone.

Twice I've aced these challenge with time to spare and was then rejected or ghosted.

It's the same idea; don't invest time into a company's interview loop unless you know they're investing something too.

Yeah, we should just refuse to give away well as accept take homes when interviewing. There was the company where I and some other experience people decided to give someone a take home. And we regretted it because I think it took more than we thought. The one person that did well on it turned us down anyway.

Maybe a trick here, at least with online marked ones, is screen record a take home end to end with the result. Then say - use that result or GTFO. A bit like how they let you drive a car after passing a test once.

As someone whose taken and authored many: the whole point is often to have different levels of completion. There may technically be a "complete" point - often that isn't that hard to achieve. Usually there are several other possibly-non-obvious improvements the tester is looking for. Whether these improvements are obvious to you or not is a sign of experience.

If I'm not given that guidance directly nor given a chance to clarify it as I do the solution (as with normal interviews), I don't really want to participate in the guessing game about what they want, if missing that guess results in all the work being wasted.

As others have mentioned, I find the "limit yourself to 2-4 hours" BS. I can stand up a new http server in 2 hours to implement some API, sure. Adding unit tests, integration tests, a readme, build instructions/scripts, containerizing it, adding detailed comments, linting... generally not possible to do in 4 hours unless you have everything set up before then (I can't use my normal dev tools to do takehomes because they're through my employer). IRL you would generally scope this as a week-long task even for experienced employees.

Maybe if I were unemployed and desperate for a job I'd suffer it, but most places I'm interested in working at ask whiteboard/design problems anyway.

If it feels like a guessing game it's probably not obvious to you what the improvement is. They usually stick out like a sore thumb for the candidates that they're seeking if they're written well.

Interviewed with a company recently and they gave me a take home assessment after my initial round with the hiring manager. This being my first take home assessment ever, I excitedly sat down to solve it. I took about a couple of days (had other things to do) and sent it over. I even wrote some basic tests despite the instructions saying that they were okay to skip (wanted to impress my interviewers).

Got rejected a week after submission with no explanation. It was a really good problem and I had fun solving it and it satisfied all the requirements correctly. When, disappointed, I asked them for feedback, the recruiter simply said that they "felt that it fell under their expected level" and that "The team has a very high bar set for this role and have made it a point to make sure people who join the team can contribute immediately which unfortunately means tough decisions like this have to be made". They didn't share any specific feedback on my code despite my following up for more specifics. Really pissed me off.

At some point, it is just a numbers game. If they only have 1 position available and 5 people complete the take home test flawlessly, 4 people are going to be rejected for no good reason except that they have only one position available.

As a wise man said, it is possible to make no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness, that is life.

>can contribute immediately which unfortunately means tough decisions

You probably dodged a stressful position. Companies or teams that can’t allocate time to onboard talent are likely poorly run and can’t afford to invest in people. “Contributing immediately” is a fair indicator of that problem.

Poor onboarding is one of the most baffling common ailments in this industry.

There are so many hard problems in this industry. Onboarding is not one of them.

Typically what I have seen is that management is so busy striving for short-term deadlines etc. that they "can't spare" engineer-hours to help the new engineer properly. Heck, I've been one of the senior engineers that has not had sufficient time to spare for the new people - not by my choice. In other situations we've had new engineers inserted into our teams with zero notice -- so we've not even had the time to prepare some "day 1 wins" for the new person.

It seems incredibly obvious to me that great onboarding is a true force multiplier.

Last place I work paid a lot of fake lip service to the importance of onboarding. But the reality is that we were judged strictly by the numbers in terms of commits, Jira tickets closed, LOC, etc.

I don't think contributing immediately and allocating time to onboarding are mutually exclusive. I think ideally a well-structured onboarding process has you contributing (in small ways) as soon as possible. It doesn't necessarily have to mean you're just thrown in the deep end.

I've had this experience before.

Believe it or not, I've also gotten takehomes which took multiple hours, involved some non-trivial data retrieval and management, and gotten rejected with less effort than it took them to prepare the ask.

Later I had a sinking suspicion that it was not a real position, what it was was three brogrammers who found a way to get unemployed rubes to write code for them, for free, so they could deliver it themselves without having the requisite talent.

Are you positive that didn't happen to you too?

One company I interviewed with told me to spend no longer than 2 hours on a project. I complied and followed that time boundary, as I wasn’t paid for the interview and I didn’t feel it was fair to me to spend any more time on it than that.

Long story short, the company passed on me, saying that my code was easy to understand and high quality, but I didn’t handle all of the corner cases. I listed most of the corner cases they mentioned in the readme as limitations from the time limit. It was clear that while they said to limit my time on the project, they didn’t really mean it. They wanted an exhaustively finished product in a ridiculous amount of time.

At this point in my career, I’ll just decline interviews that don’t respect my time.

I once had a recruiter send me the project template in a .zip for the take home with the instructions to take less than 3 hours (the email wasn't timed to start right away either). No server with countdown, no forking from github, just download this zip and then email back in less than 3 hours. I thought to myself: will they check the download time from the share drive (if they even can)? will they just pass me by default for starting one day after the email delivery? Open up the zip. You need to add 6 endpoints, 2 of those are some fairly complex aggregate queries and I had to take a quick refresher on the legacy ORM they were using. For the frontend, bootstrap a react app from scratch and implement 6 flows (some even required you to go beyond the api tasks). They even encourage going above and beyond and adding unit testing and some integration tests for the UI! So then it was obvious the metagame was cheating and you'd be compared against people cheating. Are people sending edited git history? doing it in groups? what was the catch?

I obviously noped out, but am still wondering if they are aware that all the people working there 100% cheated on their take homes.

I would rather feel the metagame is that you are being free labor for an actual problem/task they are having in the company.

I always do exactly one commit with a commit time of exactly when they sent me the take home. If I actually had to fork something I would create the Github account specifically for just that take home and fork it right before pushing. Creation and modification date of files are the same.

Either they don't care or they see it and figure I must be some sort of whiz. I say that because the amount of people that don't know how git works or that file attributes are arbitrarily changeable is amazing.

And no not specifically to "cheat". Just on principle. If they require BS I give them BS. Else it's just fun. Sometimes the people actually hiring/doing the interview are also not the ones that care for this but HR/senior leadership only.

  always do exactly one commit with a commit time of exactly when they sent me the take home

  If they require BS I give them BS

So, that's editing git history to fit a narrative. I'm not judging though! I guess it really depends how bad you want the job after all. But personally I wouldn't even agree to a process like this that ensures cheating is the only way to be competitive. No company that does this is paying nearly enough to make up for the possible reputational damage, and not counting the hazzle.

What do you mean editing? I only commit at the end. I happen to set the date and time explicitly :) For all anyone knows my timezone was still off from traveling when I committed.

And yes, lots of companies have an interview process that state these things. The process makers are not the same people as are interviewing/going to be your team. I know from the other side where I have in the past internally had to advocate for proper take home practices. They really wanted to extend the take home and to say "should take 4-8 hours" (meaning really it's 2 days of work) . I told them that's BS and I wouldn't be with them right now if that was the practice back when I interviewed.

The worst thing that can happen is that they think you are cheating and they never even call you back. Bullet dodged. The best thing that can happen is that they do call you in for an interview and the interviewer tells you that you're so far the best sport and apparently know your git very well and you bond over it.

> I always do exactly one commit with a commit time of exactly when they sent me the take home.

Amazing I'm mixed on companies looking at start and end times. I think it would be ridiculous for them to actually check, but at the same time I'm curious how many people are going way over the time limit. I wonder if I should go over the time limit or not.

> And no not specifically to "cheat". Just on principle. If they require BS I give them BS. Else it's just fun.

Maybe this is controversial to say, but in reality, we're all "cheating" because we have to.

Same happened with me. Funny enough the other candidates solutions were shared on GitHub. Two funny aspects:

1. Other candidates were clearly spending 8-9 hours on the problem. I saw their commit logs. A commit every 1-2 hours for 9 hours. Several candidates public repos were like this. The assignment was like 2 pages of requirements supposed to be done in I believe 1 hour.

2. They told me (thru the recruiting firm; I never spoke with them) that it would have been resourceful to use the other candidates solutions.

In the past when I’ve given take homes (I don’t anymore) I genuinely would have wanted you to stop after the time limit. It would definitely mean that you weren’t the right candidate if you can’t do it in the time limit, which is OK! It’s meant to signal that it’s a bad fit. I wouldn’t want you feeling like you have to work after hours in the actual job, either.

Had the exact same experience. I actually got the role, but the feedback provided asked why I didn't build out something fully featured, despite them stressing to me the importance of doing it within 4 hours.

The worst part was that after working there I found them to be terribly unproductive and it would have likely taken a team there a week to build what they were suggesting...

But yeah as you said, either ignore the time constraints if you really want the role or just politely decline due to the red flag / inconsiderate nature.

It’s self reinforcing. Other people spent more than 4 hours on it and lied, so their expectation of what can be achieved in 4 hours is warped. It’s really just a way of selecting for liars, although that goes for most interview tactics.

well, obviously you failed their test but you were the best option they had.

I had a company ask me to put together a performance improvement plan involving proposed changes, instrumentation and engineering changes. They expected me to look at all their existing code, talk with engineering and other employees and put together this plan in 6-7 hours, an already ridiculously large time frame. I told them that allotted time was way too small for what they wanted and withdrew my application. It felt like they wanted me to put together a plan they could implement without paying or hiring me. Worse, I'd be working around their schedules to have these conversations so it wasn't really a take home assignment.

I wish I had saved a copy of the assignment. It was ridiculous.

So was the company the best in their field? I sometimes see small / badly managed companies pull such interview processes and it is ridiculous. You would expect they would hire 100x engineers with these tasks but I wonder what they are exactly looking for.

No. They were just starting out trying to sell their open source product. In fact, I had interviewed with a different company solving the same problem whose tech I thought was way more impressive.

Paid interview FOR THE WIN.

> ... as I wasn’t paid for the interview and I didn’t feel it was fair to me to spend any more time on it than that.

I have been paid for an interview, a coding interview where I fixed a bug and added a feature while my pair (future colleague!) chilled .. I think he surfed and I'd ask him clarifying questions occasionally? Anyhow, I got paid like $400. Best interview ever.

That's amazing. I got a $30 gift card for one interview. It wasn't much, but TBH in the interview gauntlet I've put myself through it was nice to get even the most basic recognition that my time is money.

Hey, that’s still a win. It sounds like they respected your time and knew that you’re a rare bird.

I'm in FE, and FE interviews can be like this so much. "Here's a takehome for something that in reality would take a week to complete but do it in an hour and don't spend more time on that!"

And I'm like.. an hour is not long enough to implement any reasonable webapp... I have no idea if other people went over or not, and it almost feels like a test of commitment (if I was serious I would take the actual 4 hours it would take and pretend I did it in 1 or something like that).

This is explicitly what bootcamp graduates are asked to do. It’s possible, they were just filtering out candidates that can’t work that fast.

Yeah even a basic to do list or calculator web app can take several hours if it’s your first time with the specified framework, build tool or CSS library.

Given the diversity of FE it’s quite likely for a take home project to hit one of those criteria.

> ... if it’s your first time with the specified framework, build tool or CSS library.

Depending on the position they may been testing specifically to filter people out who are using a tool for the first time. If I'm hiring a Senior Flutter Developer then it better not be their first time using Flutter.

Unless we're talking about something truly enterprise (Magento at 4 million lines of PHP dependency injected MVVC hell comes to mind) or very obtuse (hiring ocaml devs to work on their compiler) senior means senior engineer, I don't care what you worked on to be honest. Senior perl engineers can flip to ruby in month and be totally proficient. A good Java programmer with 10 years experience will have plenty to bring to the table in C++ .

If you are a senior developer and haven't seen half a dozen frameworks, tool sets, or languages under your belt. What value are you in 2 years when we shift gears

the worst part about it is that when they give a time limit they make it sound like they're doing you a favor.

"we have a takehome, but don't worry! it's just a quick little thing that should just take an hour to throw together. we're not like those other companies that give you a huge task"

Exactly. Then I've been wondering, how many people are actually going over the time? Are the reviewers actually checking any time stamps?

What can they realistically check?

I see two data points they could have: time when the template was downloaded (assuming it’s a unique link only you can access, and you didn’t download it > once/all downloads are logged) or emailed, and the time it was submitted.

All other time stamps can be spoofed.

No, I agree. I just mean like when they say, hey this will take 2 hours, how do they know? Do they even care? Or just everyone cheats and does more than the allotted time?

I did one take home that was timed in coderpad. I thought that was a little more fair.

Was this us (Fly.io)? I'm not sure how many companies give the 2 hour guideline, but we definitely do.

We don't fail take homes because of edge cases though. There are things we expect people to handle in the challenges that are important, but I don't think more/less time really influences those.

Yes, I had a very similar experience.

Honestly 2h from scratch is a rush to do anything? However simple it is, you're asking for an 'entire' greenfield project, of course I have skipped things and missed corner cases.

Especially when bootstrapping takes the most time on projects. 2 hours to code up a game of War, ok. 2 hours to spin up a useful laravel site? Ehhh

It's been surprising to me to read through the comments posted here and seeing how most people seem to really despise take-home assignments during the interview process.

Speaking as someone who absolutely hates live-coding something during an interview (unless, maybe, by chance it's a practical exercise ... something like "build up this simple CRUD web service" ... not "solve this leetcode problem" ... but this is pretty uncommon in my experience, unfortunately), I rather like take-home assignments. As long as they don't take any more than 1-3 hours. I've been in situations where I've declined a take-home assignment that was given to me where I estimated it was going to take 10-20+ hours. No idea why any company would think that is reasonable.

For myself, what I hate is when the take-home assignment comes first. Like, before you talk with anyone at all, or maybe immediately after you did the 15 minute HR/recruiter screen. If I get a take-home assignment at that point, I decline.

There's no denying the fact that a take-home assignment is a large investment by the candidate on this random chance to get the job. I'm not willing to make that investment unless I've gotten a chance to talk to at least _some_ of the people I'd be working with at a company to better gauge what the situation is and whether I think it's a good fit for me. Even a 15-minute HR/recruiter screen is not going to do that. So yeah, if they just throw the take-home assignment at me right off the bat ... yeah, no thanks.

This all being said, yes, it is frustrating though to have to go through a bunch of these and get rejected with no feedback, or just ghosted, yeah.

Take home tests are bad. Fizzbuzz questions are bad. Multiple onsite interview rounds are bad. Behavioral questions are bad. Leetcode style questions are bad. Collaborative coding tests are bad.

If you ask the majority of job seekers here, the only correct way to hire is to hand out 300K/yr offers after a casual 30 minute chat.

The actual best way is to only have a small set of senior engineers who also are very good at talking about programming, and are good with people and interviewing specifically and have a history of trust and good judgment do all of the interviews where they have a lengthy conversation about past experience, technical topics, and maybe code a little together if they think they need to and just give them total authority to make the call. It might not be that scalable but it would work the best.

This has empirically resulted in bad hiring, at multiple companies I’ve worked at. The best predictor of senior performance on the job has been the take home test or coding challenge. We frequently have seniors who suggest that the technical discussion would be enough for senior roles. We always have to let them down a bit when we tell them that the discussion is less predictive than they’ve built it up to be in their mind.

How do you know which candidates are worth your senior engineers spending all that time with?

I'm not sure. I think that's a problem to figure out. What I want to advocate for is mostly that talent scouting should be taken seriously not farmed out by scheduling random employees who aren't good at it and then collating the partial opinions of 10 people who don't really have enough time with the person to have a total view.

As they say on twitter, “this but unironically”.

My wife is a lawyer. They don’t send her a take home test, or ask her about her side project cases, or whiteboard bar exam questions. Somehow it manages to work.

Works fine as long as you went to a top-3 law school or graduated near the top of your class in a T14 school... I've explicitly seen lawyers lay that out as the criteria they hire by.

I'd rather deal with obnoxious interviews any day.

For your typical workhorse lawyer, yes.

But the legal profession, in terms of fairness for new grads, is perhaps the worst of all professions, I'm told. Basically, if you go to a top school you make 3x the average graduate based on that alone. While there is a decent correlation between school and talent, it is by no means strong enough to justify the phenomenon. Certainly it is not like this in other developed countries.

Computer Science has unfortunately been headed in that direction but at least an A+ graduate at a state school has a chance at getting the better offers.

> Somehow it manages to work.

It manages to work because expensive law schools and the state Bar do all of those things on behalf of her law firm. Meanwhile you can call yourself a programmer after taking a 30 minute online tutorial and writing a hello world script – and that is a good thing. We do not need gatekeeping in this profession.

We have certifications too - Azure, AWS, security ones, etc.

But a person with 15 certifications still gets asked to do a coding test

The best way to evaluate someone is to work with them for a year or two, yes. Everything else is full of an incredible amount of noise.

> after a casual 30 minute chat.

which you have to pay them for

To give a different opinion, any company that doesn't do a take-home gets lower priority during my job search. My favorite interview was HR screen -> 30 minute chat with another programmer -> take-home -> final interview that included a take-home review.

I didn't end up getting the job but it was easily the best and least anxiety inducing interview I've ever been through.

I don't think that's a "different opinion" at all! :-) I look at it the same way basically.

Your timeline is best case scenario though. Your example timeline could happen and then they bring you onsite and ask you to do an in-person challenge as well. Now you’ve done all of that and still get ghosted.

I’d rather do neither. That’s the main reason I have never done in person or take home coding tests in the 20+ years I’ve been conducting interviews. So far we haven’t hired a dud.

I bet while you “weren’t doing in person coding tests” as a developer you also weren’t making the type of compensation that the people who were “grinding leetCode and working for a FAANG” (tm) r/cscareerquestions.

I use to brag like you, about “not doing take home test” for 25 years. Then I landed at BigTech and saw that returning interns were making about what I made two years earlier at 45.

I’m not complaining, my goal had been to get into $BigTech in 2020 and relocate when my youngest (step)son graduated I did so without a coding interview and without relocating by pivoting to “cloud consulting/application modernization” (cloud + enterprise application architecture/development). But I tell my younger relatives to practice coding interviews and go for the most compensation possible.

I mean I agree with you on this, but the idea that you can gauge a person's skillset through conversation (gasp!) and talking about your craft and details about past projects, etc seems to be totally lost on people today.

I mean, it goes both ways. I feel that I am a fairly proficient engineer (built something with 10M+ downloads) but for a long period of my life I would do fine in every part of the interview except the part where you just chit chat a bit. I'd try to tell interviewers about myself and the smiles would just fall off their faces.

It took me a long time to understand that these sorts of conversations had their own "rules" to them, which I had to follow if I wanted to do well. These rules, of course, have virtually nothing to do with programming aptitude or ability, and seem to me, somewhat cynically, to be another way by which interviewers can allow their own biases to enter into the interview process. For instance, one time I got rejected because I seemed "too excited" about my personal side projects; it was deemed that I wouldn't be as excited about the work that I'd do at the company. Of course this is nonsense; I'm now happily employed and pretty excited about my work. I have plenty other examples of me saying reasonable things in interviews and being rejected for that reason.

There's really no silver bullet here. Getting rejected is always going to piss people off.

See, I take a bit of a different view in the example you've given. Like, if I got rejected because I seemed "too excited about my personal side projects" I'd come away from that thinking "if that's really their take away, I'm kinda glad I don't work with them!"

You're right that the conversational interviews (just like any social gathering, really) have their own rules. But I think the most important thing you can do during those interviews is to just be yourself. After all, you want them to get to know you, just as you want to get to know them, right? How else can you each be sure that you're a good fit for each other? If they reject you for something you said that is true but that they just didn't like (e.g. a difference of opinion on something), or they nitpicked some little thing you said even though the rest of the conversation went smoothly ... well, in my opinion, you're better off.

Normally I'd agree, but I got passed up by a large number of fairly reasonable-seeming companies for arbitrary reasons like this. If it's just one or two, sure, maybe I'm better off. But after that it starts to have a real impact; it becomes harder to negotiate, maybe one of those companies would have been just fine anyways, etc...

> gauge a person's skillset through conversation (gasp!)

I can't claim GP's 100% hit rate, but I think I can get to about 90% this way.

My most recent error is galling though, and absolutely would have been caught with a lightweight coding test.

Some people are really good talkers.

Seems fairly easily solved by letting that person go. Easily for the company at least.

I did over 120 combined interviews/phone screens/take home tests,etc for about 55 different companies between 2020-2022. Imo, unless it is for a big tech company, interviewing is just not worth it. Sadly I get too nervous to even try out for any of the big tech companies. Plus I'm white and in my 40's. Companies now really want people out of high school/code camp that can program in python or javascript and pay $25 an hour. If a smallish company is handing out take home tests they are only to waste your time. Most of the companies I interviewed for were looking for 3-5 new devs. In some extreme cases I was told they were looking for 10-30 devs in the next 3 months. Here we are nearly 2 years later and I browse the company linkedin page and the employees listed are still the same ones. They never hired anyone. I depleted my $60k life savings in my 18 months of unemployment. If it wasn't for my faith in a "God" and my family, I would have just killed myself via a stent of extreme drug use and homelessness. I haven't drank or smoked since high school. I did get a couple of brief contract jobs but was quickly fired/laid off. But that little bit of money on top of the stimulus payments are what got me into 2023. Then found a backend dev job for a porn site. There was no interview, I was the only one that applied. I now work with the worst code and the laziest people. But it is the coolest team. There are no "PC' police or HR nazis here. Money pours in. I work like 10 hours a week and feel like I'm in heaven.

Oh, but onto your questions. So yes it is frustrating. And as far as feedback. I stopped asking for feedback because it was always maligned. Nobody will really know why you didn't get hired, remember, these companies aren't really hiring unless you are young and cheap. In most cases my feedback sounded like it was almost for someone else. Like "needed more linux experience (I haven't touched a windows or mac OS since 2005). Or my favorite, after talking about a data warehouse I built to house 5TB of data and 15 billion rows, and all the different schemas I migrated through, their reason was they wanted someone with "more database experience".

120 interviews over the 2021 hiring boom and got nothing? I must say, this is quite out of line with most developer experiences in that time period. What area do you work in?

  > these companies aren't really hiring unless you are young and cheap

is this because its expected that younger workers work longer hours?

I was ghosted by Tenable after spending about 48 hours completing their CTF challenges, so I just posted the interview questions/challenges and my solutions to my GitHub.

https://github.com/jiva/tenable_zero_day_assessment

Totally agreed. After an initial 30 min interview, I then spent something like 12 hours working on an atypical (for me) take home project. Actually really loved the challenge and learned a lot along the way and was excited to discuss it and learn more.

Got a "Thanks, you're not moving on" message and that was it. Man, the rejection is totally fine, but I really do wish they could've spent a few min just explaining some details. I've gotten more thoughtful rejections from just cover letters and resumes, not to mention public PRs in strangers' repos.

After spending so much time, it just feels like a betrayal of some unspoken developer ethos (vs say talking to a generic HR screener). If you're going to make someone code for you for hours and then dismiss their work, please at least tell them why in just a few sentences. You don't need to comment line by line in a code review, just general thoughts like "better code org" or "poor architecture and readability" or "better tests would've caught this major bug" or whatever.

In my case this was a small company I was super excited to work for, and waited more than a year to finally have a chance to apply for (once my current job ended). It was definitely disheartening and makes it hard to want to try again with them in the future.

But, you know, the other side of the coin is that maybe they're just getting swamped with so many applications they can't take the time to thoughtfully answer each one. I imagine I'm competing against a horde of more qualified ex FAANGers right now and maybe they're too busy trying to decide between the top 3 or 4 vs the long tail of hundreds of us who failed the take home. Who knows...

> the other side of the coin is that maybe they're just getting swamped with so many applications they can't take the time to thoughtfully answer each one

Maybe. At the point in the process where you're seeing someone's project, you've already spent time probably phone screening them, sending them the project, hopefully reviewing it. It takes relatively little time to write a quick sentence or two in review of the assessment. It would be nice even if they didn't look at the project and just said "sorry, we didn't have time to look at your project because we're moving forward with other candidates".

> It takes relatively little time to write a quick sentence or two in review of the assessment

Not just that: At every job where I interviewed candidates, HR expects some kind of feedback beyond just "hire"/"no hire". At least some bullet points of highs and lows, red flags, etc.

If nothing else, this helps protect the company from false allegations of illegal discrimination by having documentation for why a particular candidate was rejected. It also helps recruiters to know if they're finding candidates who are "close to what we want" or "not even in the ballpark".

Now, I know that some interviewers can be fairly blunt in their feedback, so you'd not necessarily want to just copy-paste it to the candidate, but the point is: that feedback already exists. The recruiter/HR just needs to (maybe) sand off some of the rough edges.

That's fair enough.

Well, it's a good lesson to have gone through though. If I'm ever in a situation where I am asked to evaluate others in a similar fashion, I'll be sure to leave detailed feedback (if they want it), now that I know what it feels like.

If they're swamped, and they're asking all the ones they're swamped with to do a project that takes hours, that's abuse.

Why abuse? Well, let's say they have three solid candidates. They ask each to do an assignment. Would I do a 6-hour project for a 33% chance at a job? Maybe, especially if I really wanted that particular job.

Now let's say they have 30 candidates that they ask. Would I do 6 hours of throwaway work for a 3% chance at a job? No - not knowingly. If I'm an average candidate, I'm going to have to do that 30 times to land a job. That's 180 hours, or more than four full-time weeks of throwaway work. That's an abusive process.

Could I spend just as much time interviewing? I could, but there's a difference. If I'm interviewing with you, you're there talking to me. You can't waste my time without wasting your own. Whereas with a take-home assignment, you can waste my time but waste little or no of your own. As a result, interviewers (usually) pay some attention to not doing needless interviews, but pay less attention to not asking for needless take-home assignments.

I see your point, that there's a significant information and time asymmetry there in favor of the employer.

That said, though, I also think the take-homes are a much more enjoyable use of my time than running through interview gauntlets with people who don't even work in the same team or in tech at all (recruiters, HR screeners, upper level bosses, whatever). At least code presents a somewhat objective metric I can be measured against, as opposed to random people's opinions about me after talking for ten minutes. Those sorts of interviews feel more like theater than assessments. I'm good at them, but I don't feel like they're a good way to gauge a candidate's effectiveness, including my own.

With the best take-home I did (not this 12-hour one I was just talking about), we met right afterward to discuss the pros and cons of my assignment, what went well, what could use more care, etc. It was more of a discussion, like "Why did you do X this way" and "Did you consider Y when you chose this?", followed by a segue into how the take-home relates to the actual products they were building, and a high-level discussion about how I'd implement similar patterns in a production app. I did end up getting that job and loving it. The process never felt exploitative, and the team ended up being amazing. I'm still thankful for the person who gave me that take-home to prove myself, vs the hours of pointless recruiter chats before the assignment.

But yes, they shouldn't be 6-hour take-homes... that's too much to ask of an unpaid candidate. A reasonable take-home should take 2-3 hours max for a candidate of median skill, IMO. As an aside, my 12-hour one was my own fault for not having worked on that specific problem enough (web animations in SVG or canvas), but I was happy to be figuring out a new challenge after my last job got too easy and boring.

I only saw this mentioned in 1 other top-level comment -- ChatGPT (and yes, sorry, you may be sick of hearing about it).

There's a perspective starting to come up, ie ChatGPT is ruining take-homes. This tweet[1] is one example from the hiring side, but I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up flooding their inboxes and your submission suddenly is competing for time with a bunch of bots.

[1] https://twitter.com/djsmith42/status/1661156114883567616

I've been wondering if I should just use chatgpt or copilot for take home assessments now.

If a developer can complete a take home test with ChatGPT, can they also do their regular job with ChatGPT?

Tell me about it!!! blame the lawyers.

I'm on the other side and having to reject dozens and dozens of candidates after they spent 30+ minutes on these takehomes, and can't tell them why.

My only solace is that 30mins on a takehome beats an hour in a live interview. (my other solace is that we try to make the questions interesting and non-trivial, and we encourage candidates to use ChatGPT and then edit the answers, since the questions are just a bit too tricky for LLMs)

(hiring DevOps/SRE for wide area distributed compute: https://www.joinmassive.com/jobs?gh_jid=4236238005 )

Last two jobs I interviewed at give me take-home tests that took 8 hours to complete each.

...but both paid me a great amount of money to complete them so I’m not complaining at all.

Paid take-homes are definitely my favorite way to interview. The process doesn’t scale past 100 or so hires but if your company hasn’t hit that point yet I recommend it.

I did get a $30 gift card for one take home assessment which was a nice token. Better than nothing I suppose. They also had a timed coderpad which was nice in the sense I knew all other candidates would be evaluated the same.

But in the end, they rejected my project though with no feedback. Can't win.

Yep, been burned by this quite a bit couple of years ago. Since then, I've refused to do any asymmetric interview processes. Surprisingly, a lot of companies are willing to skip that part and go straight to the "on-site" interviews.

If more engineers start to refuse these kinds of "dance, monkey, dance" processes, they'll start phasing them out.

How do you phrase the rejection to maximize the chance of proceeding to the next interview stage?

I explain about the asymmetric risk part and just say it's an option if they pay for the time. Many companies are fine with this as hiring is expensive.

You don’t try to. You just say are not doing take home in a firm and polite way expecting things to end there and sometimes they think it’s still worth interviewing you.

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing otherwise smart people that job interviews are quantitative, unbiased processes rather than emotional, biased crapshoots.

I have gotten feedback on 3 take home projects so far, and in my experience the experience is much worse than getting no feedback at all.

The responses are arbitrary, and mostly based on the reviewers preferences.

And then knowing that what they think you did wrong makes no sense, you still have no recourse.

From my experience as an employer / owner, this is a complex issue.

In the past, when I was a middle-of-the-totem-pole decision maker, we administered a take home. I wasn't really empowered to give feedback, but as far as I know nobody did. The best take home test had a joke in the comments. We were a game company, so it made sense for us - you have to care about entertainment.

Today, as the ultimate decision maker, I ask only to see pre-existing code with git blame turned on, and I review it on screen with the candidate. In this context the candidate receives feedback, and it's almost entirely focused on style because IMO that is the single greatest predictor of actual coding experience.

Let's discuss the underlying issue here: ineligibility, of like 30-50% of candidates. In this context, take homes make sense, because they occur in the absence of any other legitimate reason you should talk to someone.

For example, here are my tech company LinkedIn Talent Solutions screening questions:

Have you completed the following level of education: Bachelor's Degree? What is your level of proficiency in English? During our call, will you be able to share recent source code, wholly authored by you, of a game, application or website you worked on?

Out of 20 candidates, 12 could answer Yes to all three. What exactly should we do with the remaining 8? I can see how a take home can address the ineligibility.

Why would you expect anyone currently employed to be able to share code they've written? Presumably, their employer would not permit that.

Oh, they should also be writing code in their free time, as a hobby? Well, maybe. Or maybe they have other hobbies, or other responsibilities. Doesn't mean they don't do a good job when they're on the clock.

> I ask only to see pre-existing code with git blame turned on, and I review it on screen with the candidate

What code are you reviewing with them? Code from their current job?

I run the recruitment process for our small firm. Here is our process that has minimized frustrations like the link OP describes:

Every candidate that we are interested in from the resume pool gets a screening call from an engineer. If they pass it, they get the option of their technical test being take home or over interview.

If they do the take home version, we have a marking rubric for the features that we are looking for in a solution along with sample solutions at the different levels. Anyone who does the take home assessment gets feedback about their submission based on that rubric so that the feedback is consistent across the multiple interviewers.

In some cases, we also share our solution if the candidate had follow up questions on the feedback that was provided.

My email interview, and job i got later at fastmail was for an Ops/Sysadmin job. The todo list was simple, go write a basic logrotate script. I was hired and worked there for a few years. I don't hate take homes. I don't think they're as much of an indicator of quality or a company litmus test as people here think it is

There may be a bias of opinions here of people who otherwise are totally qualified for the job that they are applying for bemoaning all the hoops that they have to jump through to show that they are qualified.

I’d say about a good one in eight people who have passed the phone screen end up with shockingly dismal results in the technical screen. There really is a bimodal distribution of skill in the industry. The goal of these assessments isn’t to see how good folks are but to weed out those who are absolutely terrible.

Right. I usually just offer up my personal repos (not on git hub). Proof in the pudding i am a truly middling programmer but certainly not faking my middleness.

I just spent a couple of days on one, albeit longer than it could have been because I getting back into the language and ecosystem after an absence.

No feedback at all, or even any aknowledgement that they'd looked at it, until a couple of weeks later with a request for a tech inteview.

I just refuse to do others, sorry. If they want a hands-on test, they can pay me to fix a ticket, or even just pay me to do a test project. It's a small sum for them - for me it's multiple hours, over multiple interviews, all for free, it's basically a full-time unpaid job, just BS.

Nurse here. A couple years ago, went for an interview at a hospital. Had to complete an exam in <1h. Some of the questions included drawing the anatomy of a heart, medication calculation, etc. I was never told if I passed. Went for a4-persons interview (they were 1h late...), and was offered the job (which I declined). Is it really necessary to assess someone using an exam when they have a professional license, references, and experience? Oh well.

Although I complained about the lack of feedback in another thread here[1], I was pretty surprised by the number of people who hated take-homes and refused to do them at all.

Why is that? Personally, even though I spent two days working on it and ultimately failing it, it was one of my favorite interview processes ever... way more efficient use of time for both parties, IMHO, and a better way to measure the actual skill set. And it was fast! I did the assignment in a couple days and then heard back from them in another day. That's way better than the other interview gauntlets I've had to run, which usually included 3-4 rounds of talking to a bunch of people, with weeks or sometimes months in between, and most of those folks are people I will never see again after the interview cycle.

And there's also not the absurd pressure and ambiguities of real-time whiteboarding or live coding, which is not at all representative of how people normally work (with access to the internet, their preferred workstation and IDE, etc.). Having gone through one of those sessions, THAT feels way more like a "dance, monkey, dance" bullet dodged vs the casual take-home.

By contrast, a take-home gives me a "just pretend it's a normal work day and show us how you work" situation and I can focus on the problem at hand instead of the politics of hiring. Isn't that a good thing...? What am I missing?

[1]: My complaint was about the lack of feedback after a take-home, not the take-home itself (which was actually illuminating and fun): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36446949

The problem with take-home assignments, I suspect, is that nobody reads them. You don't read somebody's github portfolio, you don't really read their resume, and you certainly don't read their exquisitely written, commented, documented, and tested take-home project. If you even skimmed it, you're not going to sit down and summarize your impression.

I'm not saying that all interviewers are lazy or bad, but most of the ones I've worked with are. Hell, maybe even I am. Time spent interviewing is time not spent working on things that you might actually be incentivized to do well.

Time spent on interviews is time invested.

Now, it is up to you to ensure that you give an accurate filter to HR, so you can do focused investments.

And interviews investment is like financial ones. You invest in multiple promising parties and expect one to outperform the others enough to make a great overall return.

Long story short, hiring is your most important activity. As if you don't hire, or worse, hire badly, you won't have the firepower when you'll need it.

And if you won't need the firepower, why are you interviewing candidates?

I've never seen a takehome that wasn't just one step out of 5 or 6 calls/panels. I've gone through 4 or 5 at this point and they've been anywhere from 30 minutes to 6 hours for a single step (one takehome I had was fizzbuzz, another was super complicated) instead of a 45min-to-1-hr phone call.

A "takehome and debrief" call wouldn't be too bad as an alternative to a full day of panels, but I've never personally come across it.

Personally, I have more enjoyable things to do with my time than spend a day doing something no one else will spend more than 5 minutes on before deleting it.

I’d rather spend a day preparing a D&D game for 6 people who will have fun for 4 hours. Once the game is over, we’ll have memories of a time we spent together.

Alternatively, I’ve spent a lot of time playing with Home Assistant. The end result has been automation I use on a daily basis.

That’s why I don’t like them.

> the absurd pressure and ambiguities of real-time whiteboarding or live coding, which is not at all representative of how people normally work

How do you qualify “build us a full system with tests and everything in 6hr plx”?

I love it when people who are smarter and more qualified than me refuse to do take home assignments. Gives me a better chance to get the job!

I largely agree that take home assignments are better than the alternative.

If you want two days of my time I’m going to invoice you for $4,000, a fair rate for a short no notice job.

I don’t have two days to give away for free to potentially multiple prospective employers. Why? That’s none of anybody’s business.

I did one where it took them a week to get back to me with, "not enough documentation" when documentation wasn't even a requirement and I did do documentation- just not enough. I suspect they just didn't like my choice of Perl- don't give me a choice then :)

As an interviewee, I don’t really feel great about take home exercises. If the exercise is really tight in scope & it’s more of a validation of whether one can code at all, that’s not so bad, but coding exercises are almost never like that.

Coding exercises I’d be ok with:

- fix all the bugs in this repo to get the tests to pass

- implement a feature to show basic understanding of a concept

- do some quiz or puzzle to show you can achieve a discreet objective

- refactor some code to clean up a mess

- show you can use their SDK in a sane way

Ways to evaluate a coding exercise I can support:

- if you can complete this exercise, that’s all we care about

- we’ll use this exercise to implement another feature in a pair programming exercise

- using it as an introduction to the type of work one might be doing

- communicating that we like to give candidates a chance to code without the pressure of someone staring at them in a live interview

- promising an up or down vote on every exercise submitted

- doesn’t require back and forth with a someone to ask a bunch of questions, mostly because it really drags out the interview process

Basically if a take home exercise anticipates all the common objections to a take home exercise, tries to address those expectations, and has an attitude of “this sucks for us as much as it sucks for you”, I’m happy to jump through reasonable hoops.

> - we’ll use this exercise to implement another feature in a pair programming exercise

One of my take homes had a follow up like this and I did enjoy it. The interview went well but then I got rejected with very confusing feedback. It's hard to win as an interviewee.

I agree 100% Politely decline and move on. Those 2-4hrs can be better spent applying to other positions. Think of all the other openings you could apply to in that amount of time? 25-30? A conservative 10, with a good cover letter.

Good luck with your search!

I agree. I invested a few hours in a take-home once, while I was interviewing for a FT, high-dollar, in-office, position with my current employer. I think the only feedback I received after I submitted it was, "we've got two other candidates and we're moving forward with them and not you."

It turns out that that position was eliminated within 12 months. If I'd been hired then I would be unemployed by now. So I'm amazed and grateful for my current position, with an incredible flexible schedule, 100% WFH, and all the rest. Sometimes things work out for the best when we least expect it.

If you are a company using this technique for hiring – and you're not providing feedback – STOP.

If you and your team cannot suss out someone's capabilities from their CV, portfolio, interview, and references then YOU SHOULD NOT INVOLVED IN THE HIRING PROCESS.

It's a shit-test that you believe helps filter out under-qualified/unmotivated candidates, but it actually has the opposite effect:

Experienced candidates (you know, the ones you actually want at your company) just move on to lower-friction interviews where they don't have to start jumping through nonsensical one-way value exchanges on Day 0.

Happened to me too once, and I agree: it's just insulting and disrespectful. It was also an ssignment with a hard time limit in my case, something that I will likely never again agree to (unless I get offered insane amounts of money or it is somehow my dream job but...).

Based on my extensive 10 years of interviewing experience and the sentiment in this thread, I think if take-homes are part of the process you probably should just not apply unless it's paid.

I strongly suspect you are reading more into the review process than exists. There probably isn't any feedback worth having.

I bet the hiring company got a bunch of "fine" or "ok" project submissions from candidates and then made somewhat arbitrary choices on who they would move forward with.

It varies a lot, but seems worse lately.

Not to "1-up" you, but I once interviewed at a company where the interviewers were not only not allowed to tell me what I got right or wrong of their questions (where there was a right/wrong answer), but were strongly discouraged from any sort of non-verbal cues about it.

I was told later this was to prevent interviewer "A" from giving me any answers that "B" might later ask. Insanity.

Someone much later said this was their "Kobyashi Maru" interview. I didn't pass it; probably for the best.

The kobyashi maru scenario is to see how you act in a no-win situation. Kirk passed by cheating.

Yeah just don’t do these. Refuse. Usually it’s a bad sign. And I’ve only done one such interview where the time commitment was what they foreshadowed (about an hour), and then gotten the job offer. Every other time it was an email rejection with 0 feedback. Not worth it.

These seem to be the standard for FE roles as far as I can tell. Probably 10/14 interview processes I've been in have said they have taken home assessments as some part of the process.

You could maybe offer a personal project repo or code example instead? Iv’ve walked through passion projects with interviewers before and found them insightful.

I haven't had time in the past couple of years to keep up with side projects.

I have interacted with more than a handful of job postings where the invitation to create a take-home deliverable was clearly a) an attempt at labor theft or b) a manager using the process to catch new buzzwords and troll for ideas to take to their team, which is still a form of labor theft.

At this point I view the practice as a signal the position wouldn't be a good fit for either party.

What if you add a license to your code deliverable, mentioning it is only to be used for interviewing purposes?

I mean sure, why not; but unless they want to open source your interview code, that license doesn’t really have teeth. Just another reason to decline take-homes, IMO.

I think the real issue is the misapplication of take-homes.

If after 3-4 rounds of systems interviewing, the company came back and said: "Hey we like you, and we're interested in making an offer, but we want to check your skills..." Yeah, I'd do the assessment. Especially if I did 1 round of 45m coding. Without that, the company can't verify that I have "FizzBuzz" level skills, and that I didn't cheat on the assessment.

When it is upfront, it is rarely worth it on either side. Companies lose a large fraction of the engineers applying into their funnel, and honestly as an engineer, it is rarely worth my time. I can spend that time interviewing at other companies that respect my time.

As with many things in life: It is when, and how things are done. Not what things are done that often matters.

Yeah, this is also my issue. You get a "take-home" after a short 15 minute intro call where some HR person basically just repeat what's on their homepage and job listing and where you repeat what's on your CV (I have a theory that HR people can't read, all observed evidence points in that direction anyway) and then you're given an 8 hour take-home. Sometimes you don't even get the intro call and just an email.

Even just a "hey, we're genuinely interested and you made it to the shortlist" or something to that effect would just make a world of difference. Now I have no idea if I'm on any sort of shortlist or if they're just shotgunning this to everyone. I tried asking a few times, but I always got such vagueries in return that I might as well not have asked, so I stopped bothering.

Would also help if people made the tests at least a little bit interesting. Now it's either "do this boring CRUD thing you've done 1000 times already" or "solve several NP-hard problems that have been subject of Turing awards within an hour".

The last time I spent quite a bit of time on one of these things because it was interesting, and even put the result on GitHub (with no mention that it was for a take-home test, it "just" looks like any other project, also slightly modified to fit my needs). Then again, what's "interesting" for one person is "boring" for another.

Everyone does a few of these and gets burned by the no replies. These days I'll point to an open source project I wrote. If that is not good enough then they weren't interested in judging my coding style / sample and more interested in something unrelated

These sorts of assignments are terrible on many levels and, in my opinion, tells you something important about the company and what it will be like working there.

If I'm presented with one, I take it as an immediate sign that I'd be a poor fit there and move on.

What's the contract between you and the company exactly? Yes, they have no obligation towards you whatsoever and they simply are pushing the border by probing how servile are you. Make a favour to the community and refuse to do take home assignments.

I see what you're saying but I'm unfortunately in a position that I need to exit my current job ASAP. I don't feel secure enough to ask to skip takehome assignments.

As an example of an effective take-home project, I was applying for a contract helping implement features for an open source project. Normally I don't like take-home project, but this project was interesting, so I was willing to give it a shot. It was basically implementing a 20-line function, but in order to implement it you had to be good enough at code spelunking to find the appropriate place to put the function, and then figure out the build system to build and debug the implementation. The implementation itself was fairly straightforward, maybe used a set or a map or something. When I was finished they talked with me about the implementation, and asked how I tested it. After I finished I realized that it was an effective interview project (even though I was annoyed at having to spend extra time), because it was designed to show if I could navigate an unfamiliar codebase and build system, which is an important skill, especially for an open source project. (I did get the contract, and it was definitely an interesting project to work with.)

I would suspect this is more likely than not (at least in the US) due to the problem of legal liability and shielding the company from lawsuits alleging unfair hiring practices if detailed feedback to the interviewee were given.

People always claim this with no evidence whatsoever.

Please cite the relevant court cases.

The irony of these claims is that the possibility of lawsuits doesn't actually stop companies from doing terrible, lawsuit-worthy things. They do such things all the time.

Occam's razor suggests the explanation is simply that companies don't care about job applicants. And this is demonstrated in many ways.

Yes, age discrimination is illegal.

If your feedback is "You're too old", then you probably shouldn't give that feedback to the applicant. But you also shouldn't discriminate in the first place.

If not giving feedback is an excuse to cover up illegal behavior, that's not a good excuse.

Legal does not have the time to screen 100% of feedback sent out to job seekers, and there’s plenty that a regular employee can say or write in casual conversation that can be used as fodder in a lawsuit. Hence the reason for these blanket policies. This isn’t some conspiracy theory but the reality of how corporations work.

> there’s plenty that a regular employee can say or write in casual conversation that can be used as fodder in a lawsuit

Again, unless you're talking about illegal discrimination, I'd like to see the relevant court cases cited for this "fodder".

If companies are covering up illegal discrimination, it's not a conspiracy theory, it's simply a conspiracy.

Moreover, people are claiming or speculating that there are blanket company policies against job applicant feedback. I have yet to hear anyone confirm this from the inside. Are there also blanket company policies that you must "ghost" job applicants, as many companies do? And what's the "legal" reason for that?

Not sure which part you disagree with? If it is about the existence of such policies, go talk to any engineer from Google or Microsoft or Meta or Apple or a hundred other companies down the list. There are written rules and trainings about interview conduct at every one of these companies, and they all cover feedback - what you are or aren’t allowed to say, how much you can share. And at every one of these companies the interviewer doesn’t even have direct contact with the candidate after the interview is done. The results are instead relayed by HR.

> If it is about the existence of such policies, go talk to any engineer from Google or Microsoft or Meta or Apple or a hundred other companies down the list.

1) I don't think Google/Microsoft/Meta/Apple are the ones giving take home assessments.

2) I've talked to many such engineers.

> There are written rules and trainings about interview conduct at every one of these companies, and they all cover feedback - what you are or aren’t allowed to say, how much you can share.

Ok, so what are the rules? You're claiming knowledge here, so please demonstrate it.

> At every one of these companies the interviewer doesn’t even have direct contact with the candidate after the interview is done.

This varies quite a bit. Also, many smaller companies don't even have an HR department. In any case, when you're doing a live interview, you tend to get some real-time feedback, whether explicit or implicit. It's completely untrue to suggest that interviewers get no feedback. The OP was complaining specifically about take home assessments, where you can't give live feedback.

This could be an interesting product idea.

Link the assignment for the applicant to the dev team to anonymously help with.

This has been the story of my professional career.

For example at one place here, Centro Ático of Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, they assigned people to create a whole website (several pages pulling media) with plain HTML+CSS+Javascript, which I did. I don't remember how much time they gave but it took days. Even I pulled an all nighter on that because it was that demanding and I had a full time job at that moment.

After that, they selected the ones they liked the most and called them for a presential interview. They called me, I had to make up an excuse at work so I could go to that.

Ghosted. Never heard from them afterwards.

Same with many other places where they make you feel at home and the communication seems to be great - most recently, at "RebelMouse". With the Silicon Valley Bank thing they told it wasn't a sure thing they would hire someone. I did the test anyway. After several weeks they told me they finally were reviewing my test. But more weeks passed and never heard anything. Asked them about that, even saying something like "I don't think you're the kind of company that ghosts people!"... But turns out they are.

If you want feedback - go with third party recruiters, they are eager to collect feedback themselves and the hiring managers share with them more openly than with a random candidate. Of course, there are issues with this way of job search (recruiters pressuring you to take lowball offers, double submitting, putting a negative weight on your application with their fee, generally being unable to work with companies that do not work with such recruiters, etc) so it might be not worth it. After all, the only feedback that really matters is the number on your paystub.

What possible feedback are people looking for after an interview, though? I've done 100s of interviews throughout my time at FAANGs. The bulk of the feedback generated is just low-value snap judgements made by people who really don't want to be there. It's a dice roll. You either land in a loop that (a) has more people that like you rather than dislike you, and (b) asks questions you know how to answer, and, by far most importantly, that you answer in the way that lines up with their biases, or you're dropped as an incompetent rube.

One of my coworkers at Amazon was leaving for greener pastures. Before she left, for the lols she showed me the feedback she left when she interviewed me. It was something absolutely brutal along the lines of "doesn't appear to be able to code at all" (I was offended upon seeing this "feedback"!). My point being: interviewing is stupid, and, generally speaking, there is no valuable feedback to be had from the process.

I agree, the feedback often makes no sense (this is probably why most companies do not give it to candidates), but if you want it - you can get it from a third party recruiter anyways.

If it's so insulting, stop subjecting yourself to it. Let me guess, white boarding is even more insulting, because don't they understand a developer of your experience can't be bothered to prepare for it?

No one owes you anything. If these companies display poor behavior during the interview process, add them to a list, name and shame, whatever you think is appropriate and move on.

I'd blame it on HR. I do the the technical part of the interview for my company. We have a very easy short take home project that's given out after the phone screen. I'm not a big fan of take home projects, but they are a good filter. I purposely made it representative of the type of problems we solve, but very simplified. A junior dev should finish it in under an hour. A senior dev in our field could probably code it up in 15 minutes. When I review the code, I have a small rubric and also attach a paragraph of comments to it before it goes back to HR. Apparently, that all gets filtered to a yes/no call back to the candidate. I didn't know this until I ran into a candidate and he said all he got was a "we're going to pass" call from our HR folks.

I'd blame it on the CTO, for not knowing or caring what HR is up to.

Vague feedback is just as bad. I once “failed” a take–home assessment and was told that my solution “wasn’t object–oriented enough”. Bullet dodged, I’d say!

Sometimes I help to create take-home assessments and provide a feedback. It is not unusual for a candidate to submit something that is copy pasted from some introductory tutorial and / or completely ignoring most of the requirements. In cases like this I do not have much choice but to respond with a generic polite rejection. Honestly, I don't believe company should be responsible for providing any kind of feedback for your assessments - it's not a bootcamp. You are either competent and therefore suitable for the position or you are not, and it was your choice to apply. Moreover, you are not the only one applying and meticulously creating a report about what you have done good or bad, and where you can improve takes a substantial amount of time.

> In cases like this I do not have much choice but to respond with a generic polite rejection.

Well, you do have a choice. You could tell them that they were rejected for copy/pasting or because the requirements were not met. You don't have to do into more detail than that.

> Moreover, you are not the only one applying and meticulously creating a report about what you have done good or bad, and where you can improve takes a substantial amount of time.

The report can be 1-2 sentences. It doesn't need to be meticulous or a "boot camp".

Do you encourage candidates to re-apply in the future or do they re-apply on their own?

If-so, you're doing yourself a favor by providing feedback so that they might improve by the next time they interview.

Name and shame on Glassdoor. I will skip companies that I can tell are a garbage fire of hiring or working

A software labor union with licensing would save a lot of trouble.

I might be jaded after many years in the industry but to me not getting interview feedback is the default state of things. I don’t know why anyone would expect it. If a company provides it - great, it just means they haven’t yet run into a lawsuit and HR hasn’t put a blanket ban in place.

Has anyone ever gotten a decent job from an interview process like this one?

TBH my past 2 jobs requested a take home assessment. 1 was a great job, 1 has been a nightmare.

Hah, this is something close to my heart.

A friend and I tried to start a company around this, basically resolving three big issues we saw with take-homes:

1) No feedback. If you spend a couple hours on something you should get meaningful feedback.

2) No clear criteria. Is the hiring company going to slam you on correct syntax? If so, you should know that upfront!

3) Time guidelines that had no enforcement and thus led to an arms race where candidates would spend ever-increasing amounts of time and skew the standard of what "good" is.

So we fixed those things:

1) We provided the feedback, not the hiring companies, so legal liability was non-existent for the hiring companies. We double-blinded the process as much as we could (evaluators didn't know who the candidate was and vice-versa).

2) We told candidates upfront what they'd be evaluated on. Not down to the level of "you must implement this problem using a max heap", but we would say something along the lines of "The company is looking for an academic algorithmic solution to this problem" or similar. We would then only allow evaluators to evaluate them on these axes and nothing else.

3) We also strictly enforced time limits by basically telling candidates "hey you'll have 2 hours to submit from the time you hit start and see the prompt, so please make sure you have two hours from when you hit start." -- not ideal, obviously, but the best we could come up with to resolve #3 above.

As you can probably imagine, the market just wasn't really there for this. I think candidates generally enjoyed it in comparison to the vague, unending slog that most take-homes are but:

1) The value prop just wasn't really there for most companies: They mostly use these types of evaluations on more junior candidates, and unfortunately the hiring market for junior candidates is highly skewed towards the employer.

2) More surprisingly, we realized the time their current engineers and managers spent evaluating these takehomes just wasn't really a consideration for them. We tried to frame it in terms of "here's how much it costs you to evaluate these take-homes wrt time spent vs. us", but it was a difficult sell regardless.

We actually had the most success evaluating candidates from more non-traditional backgrounds upfront ourselves and then charging a placement fee if they were hired, but we ultimately didn't really want to continue that.

> More surprisingly, we realized the time their current engineers and managers spent evaluating these takehomes just wasn't really a consideration for them. We tried to frame it in terms of "here's how much it costs you to evaluate these take-homes wrt time spent vs. us", but it was a difficult sell regardless.

employers don’t know, or seem to care, how much it costs them to replace and/or onboard somebody. usually because they have no idea how they’re off/on boarding hires.

not too surprising that they wouldn’t care about the cost of one component of the hiring process.

Side note: If anyone is interested in this space, highly recommend you check out https://www.woventeams.com/

i've done lots of data science take homes, and the vagueness is a huge killer. they'll hand you a dataset and give you an open ended prompt to 'analyze it'.

do they just want to see that yoiu know how to load a csv file and make a barplot? or do they want a showcase of advance statistical modeling to see where your ceiling is?

The reasoning for not giving you feedback is:

"Why should we give you feedback and basically prep and improve you for your next interview at a different company?" If you are given feedback, the company is basically doing the prep work for the next company at their own expense. There is no ROI in giving you feedback if you did not make it.

It's harsh, but true.

It's the right thing to do to treat people with respect and not come across as a trash company full of assholes. Candidates talk too.

I got some very thoughtful and actionable feedback after an interview at IBM and it certainly made me think better of them.

No HR function that's equipped with the typical level of risk aversion is going to allow feedback on why a candidate was not selected. There's simply no upside to it.

There's always an excuse like this and TBH I think it's lazy.

The answer? Or the behavior of the HR department?

Candidates are looking for feedback on what they can do better. HR doesn't want hiring managers to form opinions on that. HR wants (as near as possible) objective feedback on whether candidates meet a hiring bar, and for a hiring manager to select amongst those that do choose the best candidate. Ideally, they want you to make sure you're making serious consideration of candidates in under-represented groups in order to show commitment to DEI targets.

Oftentimes, the reasons why candidates don't get selected come down to things like "you exaggerated your involvement in a key project and we figured that out during the interview" or "you're fine, but we found someone we liked better".

How do you think honest feedback of "you should stop providing misleading descriptions of your work experience in your resume" goes over?

> they want you to make sure you're making serious consideration of candidates in under-represented groups in order to show commitment to DEI targets.

It's illegal to hire based on demographics. I'm sure lots of places do it. It's lazy to me for HR not to provide feedback to the candidate based on some "upside" or vague liability.

> How do you think honest feedback of "you should stop providing misleading descriptions of your work experience in your resume" goes over?

This sounds like a really contrived scenario. I've been the hiring manager for several positions and I've never seen enough evidence to call out a candidate for something like this. Anyways, if it were true, just find a nice way to say it: "we were unclear about your work experience and the details didn't match our job description".

On my last gig we were specifically forbidden from giving feedback because of nebulous "liability" reasons.

I don’t do them period. If you’re going to take my time, burn an engineer hour as well to show i’m a serious candidate.

Maybe offtopic: are take home projects or whiteboard excersises still needed for senior and staff positions? I had the impression that for anything below senior, yes these things were required, but for anything equal or above senior, the focus was mainly: systems design and communication skills.

It's been a requirement for the majority of interview processes I've been in for senior and staff positions.

When I was interviewing a year ago. They were required at all but one role I interviewed at. And I told them to test me anyways, despite them wanting to waive.

If you are interviewing as a software engineer, you should be able to write FizzBuzz. Yes, it is stressful. Yes, I hate leetcode too. But, a company has every right to check that you at least know the basic skill you say you do.

I've seen both. In my experience it's been rarer to see a process with no coding involved, but it happens here and there.

There are a lot of companies that give take home projects only to get free work. I always pass.

Yeah, this happened to me this week. Honestly, I wouldn't worry about it. It sucks that they don't want to see more but it could be any number of things that they isn't working out for them. This experience you have doing the takehome, it's definitely going to help you out in the future in your next interview. Just think of each interview as another opportunity to learn and grow your interviewing skills :)

But really, I think that interviewers should be gracious about takehomes. And if they're not, that gives you and indication of what kind of place it is to be.

Yea using it as a learning opportunity is useful.

Not one of the comments has mentioned a main reason why feedback isn't shared is certain people don't take critiques very well, or may think the reason for rejection is benign that it's not enough reason to reject.

The company doesn't want to spend time getting into an argument with the person over it or potential legal issues arising from such feedback.

> The company doesn't want to spend time getting into an argument with the person over it

I don’t want to either, but if the feedback they send is clearly bonkers then what am I supposed to do?

If you have a dialogue in the first place you can correct their misconceptions immediately, but if they use take home the only time you can do this is after the fact.

Then they can interview candidates without the takehome bullshit.

Companies refuse to even read a resume/cv these days. They make you sign up for an account specifically with their company and jump through all their hoops and type into fields exactly the information covered in the resume/cv/cover letter. They have you write out answers to questions they later ask you again in person.

Of companies don't want to spend the time that's fine, but they shouldn't expect prospective employees to waste exponentially more time. And arguably the job hunter is in the more desperate position, as evidenced by the fact we are willing to jump through all of the aforementioned hoops. Unpaid. For a chance at something. For which you may receive no feedback.

Fuck that it should be illegal to do so unless they compensate us.

I agree with the entirety with what you've said. Take home or not, most are reluctant to give specific feedback in general because they don't want to argue about their feedback to the interviewee and there is a potential for legal exposure if the interviewee thinks the feedback was unfair relative to some other group and wants to take action on that.

Fortunately for employers, there's no shortage of applicants willing to take these insults. This is unfortunate for applicants who respect themselves, their own time.

Tell them a firm No to any of this nonsense.

100%

I recently completed a take home challenge for a full-stack engineer role. Given a week and told I could request more time if necessary. Instructions specifically said "We're not looking for a pretty UI, we prioritize component structure and functionality." and "Use any framework you'd like." The challenge was to build a back end with four endpoints for CRUD operations on a resource representing an application for car insurance. The front end was a single form for updating and submitting the application.

So naturally I whipped up a solution in less than 24 hours with simple pre-built components that both looked great and were functional (Mantine UI + Firebase)

I submit the challenge and check the logs every day to see if they'd run the application. A week passes before I hear anything back from them, logs still showing that the front end was never visited, none of the CRUD endpoints ever submitted to. "We reviewed your submission, thank you for your time, best of luck in your search"

Naturally, I respond confused about the claim to have reviewed my submission, wondering how they managed to test the functionality without visiting the site or making any submissions. I asked if I had misunderstood the challenge, asked if there was any feedback about how my submission fell short of their expectations.

"We reviewed your submission based on the code you submitted and came to the conclusion not to move forward."

...yea long story short, I'm never spending time or money on a take-home challenge ever again.

Yep. It is now my policy to not do any take home interviews. You should do the same. They don’t respect your time.

Absent unusual circumstances (I did actually do one recently) the answer when asked to do anything alone is no, with an explanation that such tests do not respect my time and a hint that asking for such commitments might be discriminating against people whose protected class life situation prevents them from giving away hours of their time for free.

honestly if they dont pay for it or dont provide constructive feedback, upload it to github and link in your resume

It's a really bad smell if they don't give you feedback - is that a company that can provide quality code reviews to its staff, or not.

Did you sign an NDA about the assessment? Share your work with the world and ask for its feedback.

I would only take-home for interns from college, if anyone. High quality experienced hires will not do this because the market is such that no one subs take-homes for interviews; it's always in addition. They will simply say no, and you'll lose them. This is a classic example of a test that has adverse selection. You think by increasing the difficulty of hiring that you get better people, but actually you get worse people because the better people do not need to do this.

This also means something about the person running the test, though. They are not experienced enough in the engineering hiring pipe to know what to do (i.e. they are unable to differentiate good engineers from bad engineers) and either do not know or do not care about the adverse selection. This means their team is likely to be mostly mediocre engineers. You should pick it only if you need a job.

Essentially, the interview process is part of how you find out whether the team you're going to be working with is good. If you believe a certain process would not result in being able to differentiate a high-quality eng from a low-quality eng, and they're running that process: you should increase your likelihood that that firm contains many low-quality eng.

Took a "2 hour" take home project after several rounds of interviews. Actually took an entire work day. They checked it and discussed it with me. Next step was the recruiter telling me they are afraid I'm not a good cultural fit. Never again.

Oh, and the project smelled like something they actually needed in prod.

I honestly can't believe anyone would want to work for a company that gives you unpaid homework.

There is an asymmetrical power balance here. And there are lots of unknowns. You are often working with a lot of constraints and in the moment, you'll make concessions. So I don't blame the candidates.

Are you really going to be happy with 5 minutes of effort from a recruiter? If you got 5 minutes of their effort, then you’d ask for 15 minutes from an engineer.

You want these jobs more than they care about you as a candidate. If one of the companies that sent you a rejection had instead hired you, would you be insulted about how they treated the other candidates? No, you’d probably take the job and be happy you got it.

It’s a game and you’re each playing by your own rules.

Ask for feedback in writing before doing the assignment. If they agree great. If they don’t then walk.

It's pretty insulting to be frank.

As are interviews of any kind without feedback. I'm not referring to holistic feedback (let alone an explanation for why they don't move forward). I mean the kind where they grill you with question after question (often poorly phrased and sometimes insultingly basic) and don't provide any indication at all as to whether your answers are good or bad or not.

They just keep going on, poker-faced - saying, in effect: "Don't speak unless spoken to".

> I mean the kind where they grill you with question after question (often poorly phrased and sometimes insultingly basic)

I mean you'd be surprised at the number of people that can't write a for-loop ...

The point is that for whatever level of fizz-buzzing they feel they need to - far too often these companies can't fizz-buzz themselves when it comes to basic interview hygiene. You know, like maybe reading the candidate's resume and cover letter (or talking to the recruiter to whom it was explained "I haven't worked with language X at all, is that OK?") before asking them to code over the phone for language X, for example.

Or even post a job req that accurately reflects the true needs of the position in the first place. Or (getting back to the subject of this thread) when giving take-homes, provide reasonable instructions as to what is expected and by when (and under some reasonable time frame), etc -- see for example this chestnut, posted just now:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36452104

A two-way street, and a bit of common sense. That's all I'm asking for.

Hiring managers should realize that only the most desperate candidates will agree to do take home assessments, or even apply to companies with such a process.

Last time I went through the hiring process, I asked my recruiterto prioritize companies that had homeworks instead of companies that expected whiteboard or on the spot coding in an unfamiliar environment with multiple people looking over my shoulder.

Leetcode grinding for a whiteboard is a worthless skill outside of the interview. I'd rather code up something. If the project is over burdensome you can always pass.

The best homework I got was a "working" project that purposefully had bad practices scattered throughout. You could elect to fix the mistakes or just document them for the interview.

So you would rather do live coding session on a problem that is presented to you on the spot?

For every 9 leetcode interview companies, there is 1 that doesn't do that and would rather pair program or work on an actual ticket together for half a morning.

Adjust your sights on those and it's lovely. More often than not those companies are great to work for across all metrics.

Most of these leetcode interview companies just follow what Google does for that reason alone. And Google does it because they have to cull 20,000 applicants somehow in the first wave. They just _can't_ interview that many people from the jump.

I try my hardest to design practical interviews when hiring. It takes time, but the results are worth it. For example, if you're an Ops style person, you would be SSHing onto a server or troubleshooting a configuration management system.

Platforms like Woven do this automatically, but they miss the mark. A good half (if not more) of the value is observing the candidate working through the problem and responding to collaborative feedback, not in actually solving the technical issue in question.

This could be an opportunity for a business to review the take-home assignment.

The idea is, if you submit to company A, they rejected without any feedback, let's other companies know about it, and both of you is in a win-win position.

You're so 2013... Nobody takes home assessments now. Why bother, there are

1) plenty of companies who do not require that 2) those who require do not respect those who spend time on these assessments 3) even if you post about this everywhere, there is a very small chance you can change anything

There are other job search hacks out there that work x100 better than assessments. Can't share them for obvious reasons

> plenty of companies who do not require that

I'd love a list.

> even if you post about this everywhere, there is a very small chance you can change anything

What's your point? Don't post?