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Comment by gnaritas | Hacker News Reader

That's a good way to get passed over for good jobs. As a potential candidate, you aren't in a position to making such demands and your unwillingness to demonstrate your skills on a simple assignment just means you won't be considered. Plenty of other fish in the sea who have no problem completing a simple assignment.

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It depends how desperate the candidate is for a job. A coding assignment may have a hidden cost of filtering out many qualified candidates, if qualified candidates don't feel the need to apply to companies with these assignments. Anecdotally, these assignments seem like just another filter companies use, they don't replace any steps in the process, just one more hurdle to pass.

If you aren't willing to demonstrate your skills with a little coding assignment, I don't consider you a qualified candidate. I've used a coding test for years, always get exactly the good kind of people I want, it filters out the lazy and the liars, most programming candidates are liars and simply don't have the chops they claim.

>Plenty of other fish in the sea who have no problem completing a simple assignment.

And yet companies have an incredibly hard time hiring talent, even with so many other fish out there. Odd, that.

People need to start understanding their value as an employee. You create more value than you're worth; that's why companies need workers. You don't need to bend over for a potential employer. Plenty of other fish in the sea of employers, too.

It's not odd at all, those are old school companies playing by the old rules of looking for candidates locally. And demonstrating your skills isn't bending over, it's showing your value and it's how you get a job. Seriously, this notion that you should be hired for a high paying job without needing to audition for it is just absurd; I wouldn't hire anyone with your attitude.

I get recruiting emails literally every day, and people call me on my cell phone, unprompted, once a week. So yes, I absolutely am in such a position to make such demands. If a company doesn't like it, then they can do me a favor by passing me over.

And I am honestly just an average SF engineer.

The current engineering market let's me choose whatever company I want.

So, I am not going to waste my valuable time with companies that disrespect me, when there are a hundred more that I could be talking to instead.

Great, but that's an artifact of living in the SF bubble which isn't anything like the rest of the planet. That is not the current engineering market, that's the current SF market. And asking you to demonstrate your skills isn't disrespecting you, you work in an industry that doesn't have a professional certification which means it's loaded with people trying to fake it for the big paycheck; due to that, it's perfectly reasonable for companies to ask for proof of skills. If that makes you feel disrespected, you aren't in touch which what it takes to run a business.

Don't care. I am the one with the power. And I have no problem using this power to my advantage.

The way that a business relationship works, is that the person with the power gets to make the decisions. And in the market that I am in, that person is me.

And I have no problem demonstrating my skills. I just demand that there is another person from the company, on the other end of the phone line or other end of the table, investing the same amount of time into the relationship as me.

If a company thinks that it is unreasonable for me to demand an equal time investment from them, well sucks to be that company, because as we have already established, they aren't the ones with the power, so their opinion doesn't really matter. They can go find someone else to interview.

> They can go find someone else to interview.

Oh most happily will, even talking to you is a pain, I wouldn't work with you if you paid me. You're arrogant and entitled, you'd make an awful employee.

It may depend on the industry, but in tech generally there's not plenty of other fish in the sea - there's a scarcity of qualified candidates but plenty of other potential employers who desperately want to hire.

That's really not true; there's only a scarcity if you insist on locality. There's no shortage of qualified remote workers when you open up your search the whole country or whole world. Employers crying about scarcity are employers who haven't figured out remote working is the future.

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