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Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

If you're not willing to pay me on the order of $100/hr to do your homework, I'm not willing to play your recruitment game.

My time is valuable and if an employer isn't willing to give equal effort in the interview process, I'm not interested. Also I'm not particularly interested in a workplace – especially a startup – that insists on this in a recruitment process. It leads to only hiring employees who are willing to play the game which is much more likely to exclude people who want to live lives outside of their job and fosters a culture of obsessive overwork as well as not having the diversity of opinion/demeanor/background/etc. which is valuable in a healthy workplace.

If you want to bring me in and spend a day with me talking and working in your office, fine. I won't, however, spend 4-10 hours working on a problem for you while working at the job I already have and doing the rest of life.

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And so playing the game of spending weeks studying CS problems and doing leetcode.com is somehow better?

Senior candidates may have already ingrained this experience, so you will lose out on senior candidates if you require take-home assignments.

Senior candidates are in the worst position for the typical algorithm/data structures interview. College is a distant memory and they need the weeks of study more than fresh graduates.

Exactly. As a 15+ year vet, I love coding homeworks because:

1) I've been coding forever, and have faced code reviews in multiple professional environments. So your "6-8 hours" will probably only take me less than two, and my code will probably look better than yours to a reviewer.

2) I get tired of having to re-read "Cracking the Code Interview", because almost none of that is frequently used outside of academia. And dealing with smug 5-year journeymen interviewers, who are accustomed to asking 1-year juniors to traverse binary search trees and name all of the design patterns that they've memorized from books.

No matter what process your company uses, there will always be people trash-talking it on the Internet. "I refuse to interview at those places", "I insist on being paid an hourly rate to deal with them", etc. I'm sure that 99% of this is chest-thumping bullshit. But regardless, if you're going to filter out part of the candidate pool no matter which path you take... I'd much rather filter those 25-year olds who feel too entitled to write some code, and legitimately believe that companies should just glance at their GitHub page and then hurl them a giant sack of money.

The thing is, the companies giving homework assignments still go through the regular onsite interview process. So it really is just an added burden of stress and time on the candidates. Arguably studying CS problems also helps job performance, though probably not as much as it could.

That's not always true. The best interview experiences I've had were at companies where you were given a homework assignment, and then invited on-site to talk about your solution for that assignment. That's not at all comparable to the standard Apple/Google/Microsoft/Facebook process where you're expected to come in and solve some graph theory or dynamic programming problems on a whiteboard for 4-6 hours.

I would much rather do a homework assignment and then come in and have a code review or design discussion about my solution than do the standard process. And, I would argue that it gives the company a much better look at my skills and aptitudes than the whiteboard interview. I have never once written a dynamic programming algorithm from scratch, in 11 years of programming. I have implemented graph theory algorithms only a handful of times. But create a relatively basic piece of functionality, and then justify my solution in code review? I do that literally every day, and sometimes more than once per day.

I understand that writing code for a homework assignment can be seen as giving the company I'm interviewing for "free labor". But, as others have pointed out, from the interviewee's perspective, there's not a huge distinction between spending 8 hours cramming Introduction to Algorithms and Cracking the Coding Interview versus spending 8 hours making a website using Django or Ruby on Rails (to name two interview tasks that I've actually been presented with). Frankly, I was much happier writing the websites, as it seemed much less pointless than memorizing how to write Floyd-Warshall all-pairs shortest path in Java on a whiteboard.

I can understand wanting payment.

Wanting the employer to spend "equal effort" is silly. Their loss is not necessarily your gain.

| fosters a culture of obsessive overwork

Ironically, one of the things outside interests can teach you about is something called overtraining, where you can actually get worse at doing something from doing it more or harder.

If you've heard cross-training in a fitness context, it's named that because it's intended to be an antidote for overtraining. Branching out makes you more resilient. Your ability to solve problems isn't helped by hyperfocussing on an extremely narrow context.

Any inventor can tell you that the really big stuff comes from fusing ideas from seemingly unrelated disciplines. And yet we bury our heads because we don't know any better, and we don't know better because we've buried our heads.

How entitled. Nobody owes you anything for your desire for them to pay you a salary.

That works both ways, it's not them paying you a salary, it's an exchange of salary for your time and skills.

A willingness to give away your time for free is an indication you don't value yourself that highly.

The difference is that you, as an applicant, want to be part of something someone else created and to use it to feed and clothe yourself.

Nobody is asking for free work. And I definitely would never hire someone that calls a four hour exercise that is part of an application process "an indication you don't value yourself highly." In fact, it would be a huge red flag and I'd throw that applicant'a resume into the trash can.

And they, as an employer, want you to trade some of your irreplaceable time on earth for some money and the chance to "be part of something".

If you can't see the symmetry in the situation it says something about your values, but it is not a compelling argument.

Homework is an investment, with some delay and some risk to it.

Lots of good vendors offer free trials or guarantees without it harming their reputation. In fact most customers object to shouldering all the risk.

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