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Comment by nsxwolf | Hacker News Reader

On my last job search I found that overloading myself with interviews was very stressful. It's one of the reason I will no longer continue with any process that has take home assignments - at one point I had 4 different assignments with overlapping due dates. Far too much stress (and I was ghosted on all of them).

It's also not fun to be waiting to hear from the places you're really interested in while you've multiple exploding offers. One of the offers exploded before the date I was told it would. On the plus side I was able to use the offers as leverage to speed up the process at the job I finally did take.

If I have to do it again I will set some sensible limits on myself.

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I always thought the idea of a take-home sounded appealing, especially when I first heard of them ~15 years ago.

The first time I found a bug in a company's take home project spec rather spoiled them for me. And sadly, that's not the only time that happened! A candidate who puts more effort into it than the person who created it gets rewarded by feeling confused or like they're missing something because it doesn't add up? Nope, not great.

And now, 15 years further along, the idea of investing 4+ hours of my own time without even a human to ask questions of or discuss things with just has no real appeal (I've seen some that expect 8+, even).

What is a waste is interviewing for a Sr backend python role and being given a timed online test to implement a linked list class scratch.

IF I ever needed a linked list, I’d use collections.deque like a professional.

Seems like these days it’s that or 4 hours of leetcode which is even worse

Hmm, yeah. I updated some assignment with a super legacy library to a new one, then got dinged for issues this highlighted in the original code…

Oh, and they took issue with the fact that my files were named in CamelCase instead of smake case.

Overall I think any form of take-home/leetcode is just depressing.

I don't blame you. Take home assignments are ridiculous, anyway. My personal time is valuable to me and it's unrealistic to expect me to do homework just for the privilege of an interview.

In my last job hunt, I flat out declined further interview if I was requested to do a take home assignment.

Would you prefer a take home or a live coding challenge?

I have the total opposite experience. I have rarely done well on a live code problem, I clam up. Tbh it’s humiliating, not representative of my actual skill set, and a waste of everyone’s time.

The amount of time I’d need to study to be good at live coding is less than doing a couple take homes for companies I’m actually interested in.

The advantage of live coding challenges is that they require the employer to put skin in the game by allocating 1 hour of their own engineers' time. This encourages them to filter candidates beforehand and discarding bad-fits early rather than wasting every applicant's time even if they have no chance to begin with.

The idea of a take home originally appealed to me, but my actual track record with them is very poor. They are usually too open ended - sometimes they'll say to write some service, that it shouldn't take more than an evening, and then you're left questioning how much they're expecting. Do they want a quick proof of concept? Do they want unit tests? Acceptance tests?

Then there's the follow up - often a rejection with no comments on the code whatsoever. Or you get completely ghosted. Or, and this is the real kicker - they finally ask you to come in, where they have you do leetcode on a whiteboard anyway.

If the process was "Here's what we're expecting, turn it in by X date, we'll have you do a review with the team, and assuming all goes well, we'll talk about an offer at that point" I would be a lot more open to them. But that's never the process.

I strongly agree that rejection w/o any comment on the project you just spent 4-10 hours on, is very frustrating. Of course, it's just a subset of the whole interview process, not just programming, you never know what the actual reason you got rejected was.

> often a rejection with no comments on the code whatsoever

Honestly, after getting a rejection with motivation 2 times now, I’m leaning towards rejections without motivation being better.

I just do not care to see how utterly arbitrary a lot of the reasons are. The basically come down to ‘you did some things I personally didn’t like’.

You are more likely to be ghosted at this point in the interview process. I'm leaning towards skipping them. The online ones are not bad unless I have to entertain the interview while trying to work.

Ugh yeah, one place I worked at handed out these tasks and specifically didn't mention to write unit tests despite it being a hard requirement because "We don't want people who don't do this without being prompted".

I personally prefer take home problems (I also have a bad track record on "speedrun this Leetcode problem" interviews). However I think it'd be great if applicants could choose one or the other, without any bias in either direction.

Personally, I'd prefer an actual small contract gig. Most companies have something tangential that they'd like to have but may not be worth dedicating their full-timers to, or isn't directly in line with their main focus. Some small tool, bit of automation that would help, or minor project.

It gives us an actual chance to work together professionally on a real thing. I get actual pay. The company gets something actually useful (not just a puzzle solution). The team can keep their focus on the bigger stuff. It's kind of a win-win.

It does need to be something rather small and non-critical, yet relevant enough, which might be a little more difficult than just picking a generic puzzle. And requires a little extra setup for the contracting and pay. So I can see why many don't bother.

It could be worse; imagine you go through multiple algorithmic rounds and a take-home task to get into TopTal, then when finally there you still need to bid for jobs against 1000s other developers with a TopTal matcher picking the cheapest ones (imagine $30/h for ML gigs), and even if you are picked by the matcher, you still need to pass client interviews.

Time for a new career at that point. Might as well join plumbing school.

I felt exactly the opposite.

Having so many interviews makes you feel more relaxed for every interview because you become numb to it. You don’t care if you flunk your FAANG interview because you already have a good chance with a mid-sized smaller company, which makes you even better for the FAANG interview.

I did over a dozen interview loops when I was looking last year and I felt great and at the top of my game.

If some companies do take-home assignments and others don’t, I think that’s maybe good in general as it means there’s still a good chance for people who don’t like the assignments and for people for whole the assignments are a great way to show their skills (and who eg perform poorly in a more traditional interview).

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