Lol, take home technical assignment. Why would I ever? I'd much rather have a comfortable conversation with someone who has worked with me in the past. I'm never, ever doing a 4 hour assignment for you.
Then there's senior in most of the rest of the industry. We don't do long, annoying interviews. If your process drags on we've already accepted one of our other offers. We don't make FAANG money (mostly) but we also don't put up with horseshit. You want me, or not? If not, 100 other companies do, so bye and have a nice day.
Recently went through this. Got an email at 2pm saying "please run through this exercise". Looked at the doc, then decided to hit it. I submitted everything back before 6pm. It was around 2.5 hours, and I took a short break in the middle. I screen-captured my whole session (not sent in) but to have a little souvenir of the exercise. There's really not much way I could have 'cheated' on the time because there was only 4 hrs tops between sending the email and submitted my results.
Their estimate was 'we expect this to take 2-3 hours', and they weren't all that wrong. I could see someone less experienced taking more than 2 hours just on one of the bad queries - unless you've seen the pattern(s) before it's hard to recognize and refactor quickly.
As a current FAANG employee, I didn’t put up with that bullshit from anyone including FAANG companies.
> I'm never, ever doing a 4 hour assignment for you.
Boo hoo, you need to spend four hours of your life to take home multiples of the median American family's income. It blows my mind how conceited some people in this industry can be, and I'm glad I don't work with them. This is one reason why the take home is a great filter.
The post is about this topic, so the responses are about the topic. You think that 4 hour take home technical assessments are a reasonable filter. Awesome, you are a person who can apply for the position op is focused on.
Hiding that you're going to spring it on people should give you numbers, by the people who ghost you the moment it appears, if you wanted to test for it.
If I interview at three places, that's three days of unpaid work (or 6+ evenings after I've already worked a full day at my normal job), and if I'm already making "multiples of the median American family's income" elsewhere, then it becomes less attractive to put up with that, especially if other companies aren't asking for it.
Like I just can't find the energy to put up with Amazon's 2.5 hour span of unbroken time take-home test, no matter how desperate they make themselves sound or how often they contact me (which is almost every week at this point). When I last considered it, I was already having trouble juggling just finding holes in the day to manage about 30 interviews I ended up doing, across about 8 companies. I had no energy to study for, and then do, that exam on top of it (I did do three 45-60 minute exams, across three evenings, for three other companies, though).
By the sounds of it, that test would be the best bit of your time at Amazon.
Point is they don't need to, and companies that insist on it are hurting only themselves.
> But I have seen multiple coworkers with 10-20 years of experience as software engineers with glowing recommendations get fired because they couldn't write software
I can imagine multiple reasons for this to occur at a company and a bunch of them reflect poorly on the build and architecture at the company
Could someone articulate what's the norm now for non-FAANG pure-tech companies? I might go back to the open market next year after grad school since I don't have much of a network in Canada.
(I have decent 10y+ experience at startups and a unicorn, in both big data analytics and full stack applications and I'm good at system design, take home assignments and even live coding but really suck at physical white boarding complex algorithms with someone literally watching over me)
I have 20y+ experience in startups, unicorn, large companies, big data analytics, full stack applications, and system design.
I am not asked to interview with whiteboard coding when someone wants to hire me from a referral. They are glorified meet and greets.
This is what having a network of people who have worked with you before, and have seen your productivity does. You don't interview the same way other people do, people want you for you, because they know that it doesn't matter what the technology is, you're going to provide a crazy level of value, and they want that level of value in their situation.
Before my current job, my last three jobs (2014, 2016, and 2018) were as a bog standard “enterprise” Senior software engineer/team lead/de facto “architect” who was hired to help the company mature. I got my job by talking to the manager, director, CTO based on my network and discussing my past successes and how I would go about helping then with their real world problems.
I am 99% sure if and when I leave my current job in the cloud consulting department at BigTech and probably go back to smaller companies I won’t be asked to do a “take home test”. My network is stronger now than it was before I came.
1) a 2 hour conversation with one of the founders, followed by a 2 week tryout (paid consulting), followed by a job offer that I accepted. This was through a HN Who Is Hiring post.
2) a round of multi-hour onsite interviews involving white boards, live coding, pairing, etc., but no take-homes. This was through Triplebyte, which organized everything.
There were a couple of other discussions involving take-homes (one of them in good faith on the company's part, the other a little more doubtful) and those two experiences convinced me to not do them any more.
I guess I could imagine a take-home project if it was (through discussion) something that interested me and that I thought would be useful and I could keep the code afterwards, to re-use for other purposes.
But if you are a medium size enterprise company that isn’t paying that type of compensation, you can’t.
I'm senior. Got something I haven't seen? That and some stalking on LinkedIn or emailing and asking for a resume or just to say "hi", seems to be working for some recruiters out there.
OP is hiring for a devops role and has to mention k8s in their pleading. Anybody who mentions k8s to me as something I need to know immediately wins a quizzing regarding what their assets are and what are they doing with it which is so unique that they'd need my expertise; that's usually the end of it. To be clear: I am senior enough to know that doing k8s safely would be THE job, so not making it THE job means you don't meet my quality standards. Other people need my help more than you do, and I don't care what you pay.