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Comment by lelanthran | Hacker News Reader

> As something of a counterpoint, a literal 4-hour assignment isn't that bad--especially as an alternative to a day of interviews.

As a counter counterpoint, that only makes sense if the candidate is applying to a single place.

If the candidate has lined up 4 interviews, they're not going to get 16 hours in the week to complete them. The fifth place that has no 4 hour interviews will get the candidate.

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What sucks though is when companies say 4 hours but then give extra credit to projects that clearly took more than 4 hours.

I did a take home project for Netflix that didn't have a time box IIRC - but something like "no more than a few hours". The task was to code a few movie poster carousels w/o using a web framework. Basically to create your own mini-higher level framework paradigm from vanilla JS or a low-level framework like JQuery.

I spent 7 hours on it and was fairly proud of it. I got dinged for not creating a virtual DOM and instead using the actual DOM as a source of truth. I even put in my notes (which I don't think were read) that in the real world you'd probably use a virtual DOM for this, but that would be a whole project in itself. Apparently I was supposed to spend the whole weekend creating React from scratch.

This is maybe overly cynical, but maybe they want people who say (to themselves, if nothing else) they did 10 hours of work in a few hours? Easy to keep people feeling inadequate and working overtime for free.

This kind of frustration is what got me into writing open source. I wanted an open body of work to point to that I could reuse from one employer to the next that proved I knew wtf I was doing.

It also let me weed out the weirdly numerous companies who threw 8 hour assignments over the wall but apparently lacked the time to spend 10 minutes looking at my open source projects.

The last time I was actively looking for a job (instead of being recruited via my network), was in 2016. Looking at my spreadsheet, I was somewhere in the process of interviewing (phone screen -> in person -> waiting for an offer) for 15 different companies. Why would I ever have jumped through hoops if they were all paying about the same.

I took the first one that met my compensation/technology/commute requirements. Back then, one Enterprise CRUD job looked like any other.

> Back then, one Enterprise CRUD job looked like any other.

They still do.

Exactly this - it is incredibly disrespectful to peoples time, it's impossible to do a few interviews like this.

If you have kids, your partner may have to take time off too, it's just not workable.

I say no to these, and to tests these days.

To put it another way, it may be selecting for the candidate who wants exactly this job and none other.

Loyalty becomes the main criterion.

I have mixed feelings about this, but I can see why employers might want this.

I agree, but "loyalty" doesn't sound like the right word.

If a company demands you run an arbitrarily long and unpleasant obstacle course without any goal or criteria just because they asked you, what they are looking for is subservience.

Fair.

I was trying to be charitable. :)

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