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Comment by infecto | Hacker News Reader

This sits somewhere in the middle for me. On one hand I probably would not do this exercise for most companies but I probably would for a company I was excited about. It kind of makes sense if they are getting high volume of applications, you definitely will miss great candidates doing this but does it not also servce as a self-selection for the type of candidate they want?

Curious if the co-founder who was posting in here will share his take.

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To give more context from an employee's point of view [just my opinion and might be completely wrong]

For a job switch, I need to spend time in three different stages:

---------------

Preparation:

Leetcode (Blind 75) : 150 hours

System Design + DBMS + OS + Networking : 100 hours

Behavioural Questions (preparing STAR format answers): 10-20 hours

------------

Application:

Avg time for sending 500 applications: 20 hours (Assuming 1 application every 2.5 minutes)

-------------

Interviews:

Let's say I got 25 callbacks and 10 of them asked for takehome.

Person to person interviews time: 25 * 3 = 75 hours

Takehomes: 10 * 6 hours = 60 hours.

-------------

All in all, I'm already spending 415 hours of unpaid work to get x% of salary increment. Not including the side projects or hackathons we may need.

So having a takehome exercise asking to make an active contribution to the company is....bad. Sure i can reject it but not everyone will. which is what led us into the multiple rounds of algo interviews hellhole.

I apologize if what I'm saying is harsh. All I want is for leadership to see us as humans with families and not monkeys jumping through hoops.

Not harsh and I don't disagree. On the flip side though if they have a large volume of applicants and they are a sub 50 company right now, it probably does not matter what kind of hoops they make people jump through, they will most likely identify candidate that match their fit. What I am saying is that nobody is wrong in this situation.

If it’s a job that wisely does not emphasize leetcode, you can skip those 150 hours of that.

yea but a lot of the super high paying ones do, so it's a small price to pay for a large paycheck

I’m in a privileged position and have never done leetcode.

I have worked at multiple FAANGs and even small startups. I have never once seen anyone care about leetcode, GitHub punchcards, stack overflow score, or any of the social media stuff people boast about here. Literally none of this fits in to any evaluation rubric.

All it says is your hobby is programming.

Huh? It’s not about some profile scores it’s about practice. Leetcode type problems are asked at most (all) FAANG like companies.

But you must remember that they don't want you. They already have more applicants than they can handle.

The trouble is that the leadership does see you as human, which results in them trying to say "Go away! You are not welcome here." as politely as possible.

415 hours??

Well this is the problem with tech hiring. Not convinced an IQ test or other “unstudyable” exam wouldn’t be better.

Hell maybe nepotism was the way to go all along. Do other industries require 10 weeks of full time practice to get a gig?

My industry is related to the power grid. I've worked at two amazing companies. The first had me come out for a 3 hour interview for a summer internship where they accessed my work ethic and culture fit. Once I graduated, I was immediately given an offer letter. The second job required most of a day to interview and I had to prepare a PPT and then got an offer. I also interviewed for another gig that did like four one-hour interviews spread out across a month. What software developers do sounds like absolute hell. My industry has very high demand and very low supply of experienced candidates at the moment though.

It is not a problem with tech hiring in general, just hiring where there are millions of people lined up down the street vying for the same position. To be sure, the job will still most likely go to a friend or relative, but if you are willing to jump through insane hoops you might also be considered. But it is to be taken as a hint that says: "Unless you are extra super sure that you are so special that we can't turn you down, don't waste your time, or ours."

Most other jobs, including Mom & Pop Tech Co., are happy if anyone applies at all and will take what they can get.

They want candidates who care about their product, not people who merely rank companies by compensation, subject a constraint on time spent preparing. If you don't particularly care what you are working on, you would be better off at a big company.

On homework problems for jobs, I have a strict policy of "no more than 4 hours of free work, and I retain full copyrights to that work." A lot of people are picking up on the first clause of that policy, and companies seem to be adapting, but the second clause still isn't common yet.

When the company is asking for open source contributions to an open source code base, as it is in this particular case, that second clause is clearly a deal breaker.

Yes I agree. I think you could easily add if the pr is merged we reward it with some money etc and it would be perfect.

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