HN Explorer

Ask HN: Interviewing, how much take home work is OK?

5 points by jethro_tell ↗ HN
I'm interviewing for the first time in a long time.

I'm a 10+ year systems/networking/DevOps eng. I've seen some shit. I've interviewed over 400 people for a FAANG company.

In my current round of interviews, I've been asked hardly any questions of substance. No situational 'how would you solve this?' type questions. There's some basic questions, a coding interview, and then they want to send me home with homework. It feels like a red flag to me. As if the company is fine with pushing off their incompetence into my free time. Every one of these I've gotten, I think, 'You could have spent 35 minutes walking through a similar problem with me to see if I'm in the right path to solve the issues you have in your day to day. So far, I've just dropped any company that assigns homework. I'm not applying for a Sr. level role, just wanna make widgets and like most of us in this industry, I just read a book and then pull up the docs of the stack I'm working with and figure it out.

It's been so frequent in this recent job search that I can't tell if that's just the way things are done now or if it's a real red flag that says the company won't respect my time or competency.

What gives? Have things changed? Am I out of touch? Is that a red flag or just the way we do things now?

8 comments

[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 33.9 ms ] thread
PaulHoule
I dunno.

Signal had me write a complete async io http server in Java implementing a simple api in a few hours.

I got half of it done in twice the time but I had fun, I never wrote an http server with select and thought I’d like to try. I did not get the job but I didn’t feel it was a waste of time.

Your mileage may vary.

jethro_tell
Was this for a Sr role? Are you a dev?

They all seem like interesting problems but it just feels like it forshadows a mis management problem where if they can't figure out how to do something they just push it out into your free time and make you brute force it.

IDK, maybe I'm just a grumpy sysAdmin?

PaulHoule
It's a generic task for a test, not work that they need done.

The person they want, who is really good at writing network servers, could get that task done in that time.

Me I am really good at other things but didn't know when I started exactly how http works. Now I do.

jethro_tell
> Me I am really good at other things but didn't know when I started exactly how http works. Now I do.

This is the thing though, there are so many stacks and protocols that no one can know them all. But if you're compitent in this industry, you can learn a protocol, stack or language syntax in a few days and do the needful. An interview question about how you learn, or debug should serve the same purpose. Maybe different for a full development role but IDK, I'm not a full dev just systems and infra scripting.

PaulHoule
Writing a server with select takes ‘mad skills’, that is, an understanding of fundamentals that makes you a systems programmer.
bradknowles
With respect, a Systems Programmer is not how the OP described themselves.

If the company is expecting to get Systems Programmers when they’re posting a job opening for a DevOps role, then someone is going to get a very rude surprise.

If you want to give someone a take-home task that is appropriate for the role being advertised, that’s one thing. And you’re taking a risk that they won’t just farm out that work to someone else.

But giving someone a take-home task for a completely different type of role than the one you’re advertising for, that’s just begging for a disaster to occur.

[dead] draw_down
I don’t necessarily think there’s anything wrong with it but I personally don’t want to do take home tests. I’m ok with not getting hired at some places because of this.

I have done them in the past (and gotten hired from them) so like I said, I don’t think it’s bad. I’m just tired of that kind of thing. If an interview isn’t enough, bye bye