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Comment by inertiatic | Hacker News Reader

I'm considering applying but the application form is so painful...

In particular:

"Please describe in as much detail as you think is appropriate what the responsibilities of the Model, View, and Controller are, both in general and in Rails specifically, and what the benefits of this separation are."

and

"A user browses to https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce in their browser. Please describe in as much detail as you think is appropriate the lifecycle of this request and what happens in the browser, over the network, on GitLab servers, and in the GitLab Rails application before the request completes"

are answerable by anyone who can google in whatever level of detail one desires, but if you are to actually explain these in detail yourself you will end up wasting quite a bit of time for what's more than likely a canned response.

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I'm not affiliated with Gitlab in any way, so I wouldn't know, but I'd speculate that the point of these questions is not to see if a candidate knows what MVC is or how a request is made, but to see if they can explain these things in writing.

It may seem like a pointless skill but, at least in my experience, fully remote companies have to rely on it for a lot of things. I've met a lot of people who were great at what they did, but couldn't write an useful email. That's less of a big deal when you can communicate in person and smooth things over via blackboard diagrams and back-and-forth questions. But when you're an ocean apart and have only four hours of overlapping hours that's a lot harder.

FWIW, I used to be involved in hiring for remote positions at a former workplace, and we had one of these, precisely in order to see if our candidate could write an email or a wiki page explaining something. The only thing we did differently was that we used this at a slightly later step and tailored the questions to each candidate's experience, so as to avoid canned responses (not that it's hard for a good eye that has access to an Internet-connected machine to spot those).

As a hiring manager at GitLab, I'll tell you that these questions are surprisingly effective in filtering candidates. I'm sorry it feels painful to you, however, it's for good reason.

How would you know?

Most of us laugh at a question like that on an application and move on. It's not worth the effort. You have no idea what candidates you never even see because of those ridiculous questions on an applications.

The question is, do they get a consistent stream of high-quality candidates via this process? If they do get enough to saturate the rest of their pipeline, why wouldn't they use a filter like this? I too balk at questions like this, but I think it's very reasonable to imagine it being effective enough for them.

Because wasting someone else's time isn't great, and we're all human beings and should probably care about that.

But more importantly for the faceless hiring entity itself, because it is very short sighted. It leaves a bad impression at the very least to some people. And more importantly, you are most probably filtering out a lot of people who want to avoid useless work (thus are more likely to optimize processes) and are too honest to simply copy and paste an answer off the internet (thus would likely be honest in their interactions as coworkers as well).

I agree that the MVC question is a boring one but I kind of like life cycle request one. It’s trivial enough that you can answer it in a couple of minutes and gives a pretty good idea if you have the slightest clue as to what you are talking about. I’ve worked with people who look great on paper, you’d think they were Senior material based on exp, etc. But they couldn’t answer that question even with google.

People keep telling me that there are "senior devs" who can't do fizzbuzz either.

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