Clojurians Log v2

I’ve seen people chat about interview processes quite a bit in here - my company is re-evaluating a “4-5 hour take home assignment” for better methods, and curious if anybody could share what methods work for them? We are quickly growing, so we’re wasting years of cumulative dev time between all of our applicants and also wasting a lot of our dev time by having to review all of their submissions.

Do companies just go straight to on-site if a candidates resume checks out? How do you avoid bringing everybody into a 4-5 hour onsite?

I found it pretty amazing how many candidates weren't able to do a Fizzbuzz at-home problem, so maybe 2 hours tops if you gold plate everything, so I think it is a useful filter

You have to be mindful that not everyone has 2 hours to spend on your finely crafted interview problem though, and if someone asked me to do 4 hours free work I probably wouldn't be too pleased about it

I prefer take home assignments, even if they are 4-5 hours long. I have 2 kids (1-3 years) and would be able to find an hour here and there to complete the task. But that just my point of view.

I don’t understand the 4-5 hour interview at all, be it take-home or in person. I’ve worked with some amazingly smart, talented, hard working, and committed people in my 25 year career and none of them had a 4-5 hour interview. Sure, I’ve also worked with some duds but they tended to become apparent very quickly and were either let go or they quit.

Depending on the company and who they are looking for, I would suggest different approaches. In any case, being flexible and allowing time together with current employees is generally helpful.

@trailcapital Check out the pinned items for some relevant info.

One size fits all approaches are all wrong for everyone 🙂

@ashnur You’re right in that time spent with current employees is critical. When I think of “interview” I think of one-on-one with one or more people being grilled about this and that technology/approach/etc… I think inviting the candidate to an informal lunch with a few people is a good addition to an interview process. People naturally bond over food so if the team and/or the candidate feel like there isn’t a good fit after that then you’ve saved everybody some time at the cost of a team lunch.

I actually am in the same boat - 4 hours is not a big deal for me, since I typically enjoy these style projects and really dislike whiteboarding. However, we do get a lot of candidates who complain about the take home

So, maybe it would be good to give them choice. :thinking_face:

@ashnur I agree having different approaches could be nice. I am someone who would actually prefer the 4 hour take home than a 1 hour whiteboard session

@darrell how long is an interview you’d run? What sort of things do you do to see if the candidate does have at least some technical capability?

@trailcapital The way things work at World Singles Networks is that after resume review by HR and then engineering, we have an initial phone screen conducted by HR which is to get a “human” perspective on whether the candidate seems serious about the role and whether they’ll fit in (we’re a very small company but very diverse and we deal with a global market with a heavy focus on Arab and African verticals, plus many others). Based on that screening call we may go forward with an engineering interview — typically an hour — directed by my mind map of topics (see pinned items in this channel). Not really a technical interview — we abhor on-the-spot coding challenges and “trick question” stuff — and if they do well there, they’ll usually be interviewed by senior management, again more for “human” aspects. We don’t do take home problems or any other pure technical filtering because, frankly, those methods are pretty much all broken.

I’ve used that approach for decades as a hiring manager and never had to fire anyone subsequently for technical performance reasons.

My feeling is that anything you try to do in real time in the interview, as far as quizzes/coding goes, is not going to reflect reality so it’s flawed. If you ask someone to do a trivial at home project, you have no idea whether they did it themselves or copied it from somewhere, and if you’re asking for a non-trivial at-home project then you’re a) asking folks to do free work (even if it isn’t something you can use) and b) you’re imposing a heavier burden on the candidate than you’re willing to invest yourself in the process.

And, just to complicate things 🙂, I don't trust my fellow programmers, especially the young and eager, technically talented, competitive people, to give a good answer on what they would like to see as a process for interviewing them.

An approach I've experienced recently: take home test, then talk through parts of it in the interview, then leave the candidate alone for 15 minutes to add an extra feature, specifying that it doesn't have to be complete/well-written/etc (presumably to make sure they can actually write code themselves)

(I do not love take home tests, or writing code under interview pressure; for a previous role I did appreciate a test where I was left alone during the interview time to do it, especially as it was done in a TDD but with tests pre-written style - getting the first few green calmed the nerves)

Sounds fine, but I wonder what purpose does that test serve and is this the best way to serve that purpose?

I think maybe it’s that what some feel is 4-5 hours ends up being 8-10.

The thing is, I can count on one hand with a three or four missing fingers the number of times a candidate came in who wasn’t technically capable. One of those times, the candidate actually recognized it himself and ended the interview early. Also, every single time we’ve had to let someone go, it wasn’t for technical reasons. That’s not to say we don’t ask technical questions but, frankly, by the time a candidate is sitting down with us, (with that one exception, of course) we usually know whether they’re capable of doing the job and we want to know if we can work together. So how long is an interview you ask? An hour, plus or minus a few minutes. Of course there is usually a phone interview (this is all pre-COVID by the way) prior to that and possibly another follow-up interview of an hour or so. We want to respectful of their time as well and feel like asking for a long interview in the middle of their day requires they take time off from their current job which isn’t a good thing to do either.

Of course, sometimes that is unavoidable. I interviewed with a company in a different state and they flew me out for the day so I didn’t have a problem taking time off or in having a several hours long interview process. Though, in that case, I still don’t believe the interview lasted longer than about 2-2.5 hours.

I don’t understand why anyone would have a time target like that in the first place. Wouldn’t a better goal be to come up with a take home exam that tests the candidate’s skills in the shortest amount of time possible? Just my 2 cents.

I still don’t believe the take home tests are useful. Like I said; in my entire career the people I’ve worked with have been overwhelmingly qualified and they never had to take a test--be it take-home or at the office. So what are these tests really telling you that you can’t get by other means?

If I can be so frank as to border on offensive, I think this idea of testing stems from the fact that schools in the US (I can’t speak to how other countries do it) have increasingly had a singular focus on test performance. In my experience with my own children, that has nearly been to the exclusion of all else. Forget learning, just make sure they can pass the standardized tests! So now we have a workforce made up of a significant and growing segment of the population that think it’s all about the tests. It’s no wonder code testing has become so popular in recent years.

@seancorfield I like the mind map.