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Comment by shrikant | Hacker News Reader

> 3. The tryout project

The example in the post actually sounds quite relaxed (environment of candidate's choosing) compared to what I went through in a recent interview for something akin to a data analyst position.

I was given an Excel sheet with a mass of sales data in it and asked to come up with whatever 'insights' I could in 15 minutes. On a Spanish version of Windows/Office, running on a laptop with a Spanish localised keyboard layout (which meant none of the symbols were where I would expect them to be on a US or UK keyboard). I must've spent about 5ish minutes of the allotted time just figuring out how to get the required symbols to show up :(

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Your task was also 15minutes long. When I was interviewing, several companies have no taken this "project" approach, requiring 10-25 hours per project.

Sorry, but there's no way I'm going to do a 25 hour project for your company in the context of an interview, because I'm wasting time that I could use to interview for another 10 companies - which will most likely give a much larger likelihood of a job.

If you give exact requirements and give promise of a job if those requirements are met, I would consider doing the project. Anyone who does otherwise is foolish and objectively desperate.

Ha, this reminds me of an interview I had recently. After 3 hours of interviewing with 4 different people from the company, they sat me down to complete a technical test for 30 minutes.

Something I really liked about it was that they were fine with me searching up things I did not know (IMO, Googling is a skill and asking candidates to answer trivia questions solely from memory is quite unreasonable).

What was a bit inconsiderate was that they made me do this on a Mac. Now I understand most people have used a Mac before, and I certainly have worked with people who used Macs. Unfortunately though, prior to this, I had never actually used a Mac (let alone write code on it). I thought this could have been done better, but I do realize being someone who has never had the opportunity to use a Mac, I am part of an extremely small demographic.

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