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Comment by willcipriano | Hacker News Reader

I've had the same experience. Submitted a working code test and crickets. I left it up on my GitHub named "{company name} coding test" and a couple of months later they asked me to take it down beacuse other people were plagiarizing it. Like them, I was concerned with the legal ramifications of providing any sort of contact, so I took no action and didn't respond.

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If you ask a candidate to complete such a thing and then they turn in obviously copied work, isn't the author who published it doing the hiring manager a favor?

We put a shibboleth in our test for this reason, there's ~20 solutions up on GitHub and 80% of them are wrong. Feel free to copy them, it makes it so much easier for me to grade.

What does shibboleth mean to you ? It does not seem to match the original meaning of 'a signal to differentiate people from the in-group'

It differentiates our test from other GitHub projects.

It kinda works still: you tweak the exercise a bit to differentiate between the “in-house” version of the test and the rest.

Depending on the tweak it can also make the most basic of applicants fail to find matches entirely e.g. ask for a “YcomBinator” instead of a “FizzBuzz”.

you're also filtering out people with the skills but who don't want to do bs unpaid busy-work for you (maybe what you're after). ethical action goes both ways

Those people are free to evaluate existing GitHub solutions and pick the working one (out of the 20% ones, presumably).

That's way faster than writing unpaid working code and shows you're competent AND efficient.

Also, if they do that, I'll happily bring the original writer of the code to the interview to probe them on the flaws, as we hired most of them. :)

How many interviews are you doing?

About two a week lately, maybe 50% get offered the test after a short first-contact interview. We are sub-10 person team so this is a relatively large burden for us.

A baffling response at many levels. Both by the company (isn't this a great signal not to hire someone for their coding ability? Maybe everyone should put up a decoy solution) and the plagiarists (do they think the company hasn't seen the task before?).

Weird - I had this exact scenario with a contract position working with Sony. I was even rushed to complete the take-home task, after which I was ghosted.

Yeah, they were clearly plagiarizing. You should’ve told them to go pound sand

Plagiarizing aka Parent Comment just made an Open Source "library". What's wrong with using those??

If a solution to a problem is available on github it would make sense to use it if it solves the problem.

I would have sent them a contract to buy the code for $15k.

This is the correct answer, assuming you didn’t sign anything that gave them the rights to what you produced.

This is the way.

That's an excellent response

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