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0 pointspmiller27y ago0 comments

Homework is a bit of a catch-22. I agree that they can be made more real world than typical interview problems (although not all are). OTOH, why should I do your “4 hour” project, in which I’m competing with people who spend 8+ hours on it, just to get to the same onsite interview I could get with another company after a recruiter chat and a 45-60 minute technical phone screen? It’s not a good use of my time.

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dudul7y ago

These are interesting points.

Just to clarify first, the exercise should not take more than 1 hour. And I mean it. It is not difficult, or tricky or anything. It is used 1) to make sure the candidate can do very elementary things, 2) as support for follow up during the on-side interview.

Regarding "getting the on site", if you don't do the exercise before you would get the "whiteboard" BS. And then you may be competing with people who spent 2 weeks reading "cracking the tech interview". How is that different?

pmiller2OP7y ago

If your exercise truly takes 1 hour, and you're evaluating it on the basis of 1 hours' worth of effort, then fair enough. I would say that roughly equates to the technical phone screen in this case, except without all the annoying "let's talk about every little thing we're doing while we're doing it, so it takes twice as long" BS.

And there's nothing wrong with whiteboarding, if done appropriately. Whiteboarding a system design question is totally appropriate. Asking a candidate to write down code for finding the longest palindromic substring of an input string in linear time is not. I've never come to a situation where writing anything more than the barest pseudocode outline for what to do on a whiteboard was the best way to get a real world task accomplished.

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0 pointspmiller27y ago0 comments

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dudul7y ago

These are interesting points.

pmiller2OP7y ago

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