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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

> Honestly, if you can't spend one or two hours on a take home assignment during a 7 day period, you certainly have different problems than applying at this company.

That's an extremely privileged thing to say. And what a terrible way to start out your working relationship. The very first thing you ask of me is to do unpaid work in my free time? IF you're willing to do that, how else will abuse me in the future?

Also, why should they spend time on your homework before they know if you're a company they would even want to work for?

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I mostly agree, but attending any interview is also doing unpaid work in your free time, and often takes a comparable amount of time to the sort of take-home assignments used for recruiting.

I think the reason why take-home assignments tend to feel more unreasonable is the asymmetry. If I attend an interview, it's costing a pile of my time, but it's also costing a similar pile of time for multiple people at the company where I'm interviewing, which gives me some reason to think that my application's going to be considered seriously and therefore that the effort I'm putting in isn't going to be totally wasted.

Whereas a company can hand out a take-home assignment with no effort at all, so the fact that I've been given one doesn't indicate that the prospective employer sees me as a serious prospect or that there aren't hundreds of other candidates in the same position as me, so it's no guarantee that my chances of getting hired aren't miserably low, so there's more risk that I'm wasting my time.

I think you've hit the nail on the head here. A homework assignment does not indicate seriousness on the part of the company. Great insight!

As someone who uses take-home assignments as part of my hiring process, I disagree that it is no effort at all. We still have to review submissions, get the code running (we usually let the candidate do the problem with the tools of their choice). You won't believe the number of candidates we receive with great looking CVs who struggle with a warm-up coding question like this: https://www.hackerrank.com/challenges/python-quest-1/problem If anything, completing the assignment and at having some working code already gets you above 90% of applicants.

I just can't understand this mentality. You are the one who wants the job, doing the bare minimum of effort to prove that you can perform the job is too much? Why should they review your code before they know if you're someone they'd want to work with? It's part of the mating dance, and it goes both ways. Presumably you would have read up on the company or spoken to people in the industry? Unless you have some other way of proving your ability (Github projects, Kaggle, research) don't expect a job to just land in your lap.

The start of your working relationship is really important. I'll get interview offers all the time and if the compensation is off by more than 3% I just tell them no, due to compensation. Usually I get a contact back asking what I was looking for and I just tell them that I am not in the market to be making my compensation an issue each time I want a raise. They had an idea what they wanted to pay and I am not who they are looking for.

It's not perfect, but personally far preferable to having to perform with a gun to the head in an interview. Which has nothing in common with how software is written in the real world.

Would you feel better for it if you were paid $100 to do the assignment? That might be way less than you normally make, but it's something.

One of the sibling comments said it well. It's not the money, it's the fact that giving me take home work shows a lack of seriousness on the part of the company.

Although perhaps an escrow system would work. The company pays me a large sum (say $10,000), which I then pay back if they call me in for an interview. That way I know they are serious, and it actually forces them to consider the cost to themselves.

I might. Or I could do it at my normal short-term contracting rate and bill you the hours.

You are already wasting more time on doing the interviews. Why a 3 hour home assignment is any different?

One of the sibling comments said it well. It's not the money, it's the fact that giving me take home work shows a lack of seriousness on the part of the company because my time investment is much greater than theirs.

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