I have done this dance a few times. My learning about interview assignments is review the written grading rubric before reading anything else. If the grading criteria lacks specificity then don’t do the assignment. If there is no provided grading rubric in advance then don’t do the assessment.
That thread is hilarious... The dude bootstraps his own search/browser company, an incredibly difficult space, becomes profitable, and sends his customers t-shirts they didn't want. A bunch of HN users who have probably never even applied at a startup are criticizing him for how he runs his profitable business that he funded himself. If he wants to shovel every dollar of profit into a furnace, who cares? It's their money.
The (interview) game has changed and it will get worse because of more layoffs this year.
To standout, you have to be a bit creative and you must sustain yourself with your own company / startup. (4 basic instructions here) [0]
Companies do not care about you or your take home solution(s) unless you've built something that threatens their existence with a competing product that makes money and steals their users.
Stop playing by their rules with these interview 'games' unless you have lots of time. Spend your time elsewhere. You now have AI, and you should build a startup instead.
Take home assessments can be a valuable part of an interview process but they absolutely need a time limit. I think 2-3 hours is going to give you all the information you need, unless what you're selecting for is new grads with no dependents, hobbies, or responsibilities.
If this had been limited to 3 hours then the worst case is that the candidate would have lost 3 hours, but far more likely is that they would have come up with an entirely different proposal and/or solution that was appropriate for that timeline, and that extra information would have made it clearer what the company was looking for.
The other point I'd always encourage applicants to confirm is: are you looking for any answer, or are you looking for a good answer. Some take-home tests are purely about passing a test suite and how you manage it doesn't matter, some would prefer that you meet 80% of the requirements but write better code. I've seen applicants do the wrong thing on both sides of this.
To me, as someone who hires and gives candidates take home assignments, Kagi’s assignment is huge and disrespectful of the candidate’s time. Surely they’re (probably unintentionally) filtering for candidates that have a lot of time to waste on projects like this — while people who are busy (the kind of people you want) will pass.
Surely there must be other ways to have an idea on a candidate’s skills.
In our case, hiring people with data engineering skills, we just ask of them a simple ETL challenge (pull data from zip file, transform it, insert into any database). We leave ambiguities in there and there are some Easter eggs in the dataset (eg null values where you would not expect it, incorrectly formatted CSV) that we use to evaluate how well a candidate can perform.
We timebox it at 4 hours, but don’t give guidance in case they run out of time, that’s a good suggestion.
During a follow up call, we review the code together and we’ll ask them questions on how to improve the code (“what if the dataset doesn’t fit in memory”, etc), which is what the actual technical assessment is. At that point they should already feel somewhat comfortable with the problem domain, and you can assess their real skills.
The solution to this problem ultimately needs to be a regulatory one.
People should be paid for the time they spend in interviews.
You make that the law and this ambiguous hoop jumping bullshit goes away real fast. Companies will optimize for cost instead of dumping cost onto the prospective employees.
This is good for the economy because it forces companies to innovate and optimize the interview process and it saves hundreds hours of totally economically unproductive time on the part of candidates.
That's basically my feeling too. No one would ask for a maid to clean their house free for 4 hours, in order to decide if they want to hire her long term. And that's precisely what hiring managers have been getting away with for decades, because no one is pushing back. The managers are essentially abusing their power. It's all about abuse of power and utter arrogance.
But if you're unable to determine if someone has this knowledge via a phone call, instead of 4 hours of their work without you even being present, then that failing is on you, not them. If you can't judge someone's knowledge by asking questions, then you don't know how to come up with the right questions. Again that's on you. The only thing a 4-hr take home test will filter for is desperation. You'll get the most desperate candidates, and you'll do so by wasting days and days of people's time once you add it all up. It's just utterly disrespectful to demand these silly homework problems. I always take it that way. I take it personally, tbh. I find it absolutely insulting to even be asked and I simply refuse.
I'm surprised this seemed to be voted down. I've been a hiring manager for over 30 years, and I never do "technical tests" -- no take-home, no live coding, none of it.
I have a map of topics and questions, and I get the candidate chatting about their past projects, their approach, and what they liked/disliked about past projects and various technology they've used.
It takes a maximum of one hour and usually close to about thirty minutes to make a yes/no decision on a candidate (sometimes it only takes ten minutes to make a no decision, and then it's a matter of trying to politely end the interview).
I've interviewed hundreds of candidates this way over the years, and everyone I've hired has been capable of doing the job. Not once have I ever had to let someone go for lack of technical ability.
Part of the problem is that we don't train people how to conduct interviews, and another part is "this is how I was interviewed, so this is how I'm going to interview other candidates" -- pure inertia.
As an industry, we really need to do better.
As for the OP, _if_ I had been administering a vague take-home project that had a 1-week delivery deadline, and a candidate peppered me with Qs and then presented a full proposal for the project for approval, prior to working on it... I would have rejected them. But I'm pretty certain I would have decided to reject them in my regular 30-60 "chat" interview, and I would not have moved on to the take-home project and wasted their time like that. So, again, I fault the interviewer(s) for not being able to filter candidates efficiently.
I had an interview once to work for IPFS, with a guy who already knew my skill level well (decades of experience), because I was active on their web forum solving everyone's problems, for about a year. Even during the interview he mentioned the technical part of the interview wasn't even necessary, because he had total confidence in me, and didn't even ask technical questions at all. He spent the ENTIRE hour selling me on the job. I hardly had time to speak. Everything went perfectly fine. Then he asked me to do the take-home project at the very end, just because "everybody has to", and I politely told him sorry I don't do those. So that ended the opportunity. So you're exactly right it's absolutely an "inertia" thing.
I agree about Kagi, but about your process wanted to ask: do you really feel like having them write the code as a take-home task adds any signal to the process?
At my current gig we do a 1-hour pair programming kind of thing, where we video-chat and watch the candidate work on a small, straightforward task. And as the interviewer I watch how they use the tools, where they go for docs, do they read the requirements, how do they test, etc. By the end I always feel like I have a strong picture of their ability, and the whole thing is capped at 90 minutes for both sides (adding time for their questions).
If the candidate's code was written offline beforehand, I'd have no idea whether it was theirs, whether it came from a friend or chatGPT, whether it took ten minutes or ten hours, etc. Sure I could try to suss out those things during discussion, but isn't it better to observe directly?
Leaving aside the non-trivial question of candidate nervousness in live coding, I do find the "ask questions about take-home" process very illuminating.
If it came from a friend or chatGPT, you'll learn that quickly because you can ask them stuff like "show me how you're implementing FOO. OK, if the requirements change, and now we need to BAR, what do you need to change across the app?" If they wrote the code and understood the task, they should understand what needs to change, how to do it, etc, and you can do that part with them live. Maybe someday LLMs will be fast enough that you can't catch someone constantly waiting for the AI to help them, at least as of May 2025 we're not there yet.
This is a data engineer’s fizzbuzz and you would be surprised at how many people actually fail it.
If they didn’t write it themselves, they will absolutely fail in the follow-up session where the real evaluation happens and I ask them to scale the code, handle crash safety without using transactions, etc.
Some people are nervous during live coding challenges, which is why we decided to allow this to be taken home, and the candidate becoming familiar with the problem domain in their own time, rather than "live" under pressure.
Would you think doing this live in a screen sharing session adds more value? How would you prepare the candidate for this?
> Would you think doing this live in a screen sharing session adds more value?
In my experience, hugely yes. Above all else I really like that the time commitment is fixed on both sides - no homework for the candidate, and we're not asking them to invest any more time than we are.
Also doing things interactively gives a lot of leeway for adjusting and avoiding wasted time. If somebody's got one section basically solved, I might cut in and say "yeah that bit is great, let's call it finished and look at this other bit". If they're obviously having a lot of trouble, I might ask about their current work and maybe switch tasks if there's a better fit. Or if they're obviously coasting easily I might cut in with "how would you scale this?" questions that give more signal than watching them finish up the loose ends.
Another thing I like is that we can keep the task specification simple, like what you'd get from a PM, and it's up to the candidate whether they want to ask questions or jump in. I imagine that with take-home tasks you either need to give out pretty specific requirements, or else have people interpreting the task a variety of different ways.
> How would you prepare the candidate for this?
We explain at the beginning that the goal is write code for an hour and watch how they work, and there's no hard requirement for what needs to be finished by the end. And they're welcome to search the web, use AI, or anything else they'd typically do while working.
And I've only done a few dozen of these, but personally I've never seen anybody get particularly nervous. I think nerves are a bigger issue with HR style "pass all the tests within the time limit" tests, where the danger is that somebody can hit a wall and never get past it. That doesn't happen with my format, because if somebody is stuck I just give them hints until they're unstuck (since I get no signal from watching somebody scratch their head).
I don't know what ETL means (I could look it up) - regardless I can do that ETL challenge. Realtek SDR dongles and Python loved messing up CSV. The only question I'd have is if a null or and "incorrectly formatted" row was invalid or not.
So I have to wonder, is this a junior position, or did too much hadoop rub off on me a decade and a half ago?
This is for a medior solution, but it’s more intended as a data engineer’s “fizzbuzz” and then in the follow-up call I’ll ask them how they would distribute the workload over multiple clusters, make it idempotent, etc — that’s where the real technical evaluation happens.
How do you know that interviewees aren't spending more time on it?
Because you can't guarantee all candidates are spending the same amount of time, it becomes a game theory problem where the candidates will typically lose in some form. In many cases, the right answer is to spend extra time making a really polished (but not too polished!) solution and pretend like you stayed in the time limit. And every candidate is either a) doing that, or at least b) worried that their competition is doing that.
Even if we ignore that dynamic, 3 hours is a long ass time for a candidate to spend when they're not even sure they'll get to talk to another human about it.
In a 1-hour interview, you can run a candidate through a programming exercise and be guaranteed they're not wasting extra time on it. And if they happen to prefer doing take home assessments, you can always let them send you an updated answer later. (But often by the time a candidate asks me if they can do that, I've already developed a favorable view of their skills and can tell them, "go for it if you want, but you've already 'passed' my test.")
By keeping the candidate-interviewer time investment the same, you guarantee that you're respecting the candidate's time as you would your own (because you're sitting there with them.) I can help them skip over the parts I'm not interested in (e.g., by feeding them info they'd be able to find via search or telling them not to worry about certain details.)
If a hiring manager doesn't respect their candidates' time, how likely are they to respect their employees' time?
Yep, this is what I am taking from this thread: Next time I am given a take-home, I am going to ask them to promise, that I will get to talk to a human about it. They can of course straigh-ass lie about it, and I am sure I will run into such abysmal behavior at some point.
> How do you know that interviewees aren't spending more time on it?
In some cases we roughly timed it, scheduling an email for a time the candidate wanted and asked them to return it 3 hours later. In some cases we just treated it as an honour system. We made it clear that the task was intended to take about that much time and that spending more time was not allowed/encouraged.
In reality, we found that good candidates took ~1-2h, and in some cases where candidates spent a lot longer and owned up to it, we found no improvements. In one case a candidate submitted at 3h and then again at 8, and we marked the 8h version 1 mark lower.
I agree with the author that live code reviews are much better than live coding, but if companies insist on a live coding exercise: let me bring my laptop and mouse leave the room for 45 minutes and come back when we can talk about what I built.
When I see instructions that say “This project tests your ability not only to code, but to deal with ambiguity and open-endedness”, it actually means either a) this exercise has been so poorly conceived that we didn’t bother with a rubric or b) the work environment is so chaotic, we never clearly define specs or requirements for anything.
That, and the instruction to simultaneously “show off your skills” and deliver a pragmatic functional solution are completely at odds. Good simple solutions aren’t flashy.
To me, take-homes that have UI or API integrations are a bit of a red flag, because UI code (for most roles) is relatively boring, and API integrations are a lot of faff with not much signal. Cool you can make an HTTP request, cool you've got a basic CRUD editing setup. It's a lot of code that takes a lot of time and tells me almost nothing about how you code, hell, AI tools will happily generate these things in no time and at a pretty good quality.
What I want to see is an engineer implement an awkward bit of business logic. Does it become a million nested if statements and a "here be dragons" comment at the top, or do they identify the right patterns and build something that I can reason about when reading the code? This is far more valuable in the job, more signal in the interview, and much harder for AI to get right. It also takes less time.
I’ve seen a few that let you fork a repo with all that boilerplate set up and you just have a few stubbed methods to fill out, and that seems reasonable. But going from 0->1 on an app is so much grunt work and I doubt the reviewers would even look into all of it
I would say that's reasonable, although it again sorta depends on the stubbed methods and what you're trying to figure out from them, and I'd question the necessity of the boilerplate - can't you just implement the methods?
Can I ask you and everyone else - why do AI is so good at UI/CRUD apps and terrible at business logic?
I've been caught with this few times now. Spend ages trying to coerce AI to solve logic problem and end up just manually solving it myself. Whereas UIs are so good and usually near perfect from first prompt. I suspect it's the weak prompt. I need to learn and solve this before my brain completely atrophies (there must be Anthropic joke here somewhere hehe).
I doubt it's prompting. I think the issue is more likely that UI code is often similar, has a lot of examples online, and often doesn't require understanding data flow. This is why LLMs are great at "boring" React components, because they don't actually understand the flow of the data, but they don't need to.
Business logic on the other hand is much more likely to be novel in some way, there are likely fewer similar examples for rules to be learnt from, etc.
Obviously this is all gradations, LLMs can manage some business logic and mess up some UIs (they can't "see" the UI which doesn't help!), but this is my experience of them and fits with my understanding of the technology.
It's a start-up with a lot of different projects. It is expected that the work environment would be chaotic. People who look for a no-surprises type of work week should probably not apply to such a kind of workplace.
> Good simple solutions aren’t flashy.
Maybe showing off your skills is making a good and simple solution?
Sure, the work is chaotic. But why would the interview process need to be chaotic? You want to get the best signals of ability that you can, and one thing you can do to help that is to make sure that you’ve given an assignment that will be evaluated consistently on your end and understood uniformly by the participants
> Sure, the work is chaotic. But why would the interview process need to be chaotic?
Because the interview is meant to measure how well someone would perform on the work?
> You want to get the best signals of ability that you can, and one thing you can do to help that is to make sure that you’ve given an assignment that will be evaluated consistently on your end and understood uniformly by the participants
Well sure, all else being equal, but if the cost of consistency is an assignment that doesn't reflect the actual work environment then that may outweigh the benefit.
But why conflate “technical skill assessment” and “ambiguity handling” into one big stressful test?
Doing two small tests toy can measure each skill independently
A clear coding test to get technical skill and then some in person requirements gathering exercise or something to measure ambiguity handling.
You’ll get better insight into their abilities with less effort for the interviewee AND the interviewer (if the startup is really that chaotic, do you really think they are doing a careful code review on a zillion different bespoke takehomes?)
> we never clearly define specs or requirements for anything.
I mean, what if part of the role that’s being hired for is to help people clearly define the specs and requirements? I consider that a big part of what it means to be a senior software engineer.
Maybe this exact format isn’t the best way to test for it, but I don’t think “we want to see if someone can deal with ambiguity” means all the work is ambiguous. It might just mean all work needs to go through a process to take it from “ambiguous requirements” to “clearly defined specs”
> I mean, what if part of the role that’s being hired for is to help people clearly define the specs and requirements?
Then I'd expect the interview process to focus on that process, not on the final deliverable. As it stands, the candidate tried to interact with the interviewer by trying to ask for clarification on the requirements, then making a detailed proposal, and got no actionable feedback from either.
Could one do a "terminal inspired, mutt-like email client" that completely satisfies OP's proposal (web-based, TEMPL, pocketbase, pulumi, etc...)? Sure, it would be possible. None of those are _required_ for the submission but you can totally use them if you wanted to. So the interviewer probably thought, "hey this person is going all out", and was absolutely honest in saying "Looking forward to receiving your submission"
I cannot really blame the interviewer for not reminding the candidate that they should actually follow the requirements, in addition to all the optional stuff they mentioned in their spec.
I have to be blunt, you have no idea what you are talking about. I am just going to say this: A terminal app is completely at odds with an online web client. If the interviewer is as clueless as you are, that explains two things:
- I was never going to pass the interview in the first place
- I was never going to get a reasonable conversation from this person, no amount of communication is going to solve incompetence from the interviewer's side
Corollary:
- Gross negligence from the company for assigning this interviewer
> what if part of the role that’s being hired for is to help people clearly define the specs and requirements?
Then they should have responded to his questions in email?
I personally love working on projects that are vaguely defined because it means getting to interact with people and understanding the heart of the problem. My favorite roles have involved reaching out to non-technical people and figuring out how to solve their problem. Often it's not the solution they even initially asked for.
But if your role is to guess about vague specs with no communication, then you're going to fail no matter how senior you are.
I feel like Kagi was just asking "Impress us" and OP misunderstood the assignment by actually building a solid project and handling edge cases that no one cared about.
Anyways thanks for writing this up OP, it was an interesting read and I am a Kagi customer so I liked learning about them.
they actually did not... the original requirement said "a minimal, terminal-inspired email client" and "take inspiration from existing terminal email tools like aerc, mutt". This is nowhere near them, not even close.
Not sure why OP makes no mention of this in their blog post - perhaps they thought those parts were unimportant? In which case I am not surprised at the results.
The project was well made, but my read on it was that they wanted to be shown something interesting. Even if it wasn't as well made of polished, I got the impression they would have preferred something "fun" or imaginative.
From this post, it seems like the hiring manager is either not the real hiring manager (maybe just an HR agent with this lofty title) or was himself hired without any screening or on the job evaluation for reading and responding to emails (which is a big part, IMO, of any manager) or has multiple roles to play and has no time to devote to hiring.
I feel sorry for the author to have spent more time on actually doing the assignment after that reply.
I understand the frustration here. I assume Kagi has a lot of candidates and is trying to identify the best ones for handling ambiguity. While I can appreciate the interviewee’s desire for more information or a rubric, it might potentially hurt the effectiveness of the take-home assignment.
During my college days, I had an on-campus interview with Microsoft that served as an assessment for whether I would be eligible for more in-person interviews in Seattle. The interview question was open-ended: “I would like you to design an alarm clock.” It seemed like an unusual open-ended question that prompted me to consider several critical factors, such as the intended audience, physicality, visibility, and audibility. By considering these factors and not immediately presenting a solution, the interview team informed me that I had passed the test. If they had provided me with more specific instructions or guidelines before the interview, they might have missed a signal that was important to them.
Unfortunately, I did not advance to the subsequent rounds at Microsoft. I interviewed during the fall semester. While I made it thru the full process, I was informed that I lacked confidence, but wasn’t a no. I was encouraged to reapply in the spring. The initial experience had left me drained and disheartened, so I decided not to pursue a second attempt. I now deeply regret this decision and wish I had given it another chance. If anyone is in a similar situation during their college years, I strongly advise them to avoid making my mistake. Working at a FAANG company could have changed my entire life and career trajectory.
The uncertainty of the assignment and the lack of responsiveness during this week-long unpaid endeavor are inexcusable. Your anecdote strikes me as a totally different process as Kagi's in every possible way.
The problem is not the lack of a "rubric", it is the sheer amount of effort expected from the candidate, especially related to the unprofessionalism of the response. This process is set up to waste a maximum amount of time from candidates without any sort of feedback, and no proof that a reward even existed.
How many dozens of people completed this assignment and got rejected? How many of those assignments were even reviewed by the manager? Did anyone actually get hired? "Giving details would make this less effective for the manager" doesn't begin to excuse this behavior.
Honestly this hiring manager casts a negative light on the entire organization. Do they treat everyone this poorly? Business partners, employees?
> I understand the frustration here. I assume Kagi has a lot of candidates and is trying to identify the best ones for handling ambiguity. While I can appreciate the interviewee’s desire for more information or a rubric, it might potentially hurt the effectiveness of the take-home assignment.
I mean, potentially they failed the real test by asking all the questions - Kagi specifically say they're looking for people who can deal with an open-ended project, and instead of just deciding to do something cool, they seem to spend a lot of time demonstrating that they can't deal with open-endedness by asking a lot of questions and coming up with a detailed spec and asking for approval before starting.
That's not to say what Kagi is doing is good, but it's probably for the best for the candidate that they didn't get the job because it sounds like they wouldn't flourish in that kind of environment (which is better to know before starting a job, instead of starting a job you're going to hate and then burning out or failing probation)
nope, they asked the clarifying question, and got the response that there are no business requirements: "That is part of the assessment itself, see what kind of extra features you can come up if any."
They were failed because they could not deal with the answer, they were not failed for act of asking the question itself.
Actually happens sometimes in my work... Q: "Are there any requirements on the database used?" A: "Nope, just make sure the final system will be able to handle the required load"
> The initial experience had left me drained and disheartened, so I decided not to pursue a second attempt. I now deeply regret this decision and wish I had given it another chance. If anyone is in a similar situation during their college years, I strongly advise them to avoid making my mistake. Working at a FAANG company could have changed my entire life and career trajectory.
If this applies to you, this is probably the best advice anyone can give to you. I was granted an in-person interview with Microsoft as a freshman back in the early 2000s on account of my stellar GPA. They were the company to work at back then. Unfortunately, I didn't solve the brain teaser. Disheartened, I refused to try again even when they invited me to try again the next few years, and I went with an old dinosaur company instead.
I realized my mistake shortly after starting to work at the dinosaur, and clawed my way tooth and nail into a job at Microsoft. It took me 2 years, but it was the single best thing I have done for my career, and changed the course of my life for the better.
I built an email client, it sent emails, it also received emails, it had an intuitive and speedy user interface, and it touched on fundamental topics for a web-application with users, quintessential topics for a back-end engineering role.
Somehow the only criticism I got is that it was not simple enough.
Perhaps the moral of the story is that many managers have no idea what the word "simple" implies in terms of software.
This is a classic situation:
Engineer gets asked to implement the "do what I mean" button by some manager, this is a magic button that when pressed will do whatever the manager wants at that moment. The manager acts shocked when they are told that this is not a simple request to fulfill. The manager thinks: "I am being tricked! I merely asked for a single button!"
Building a concrete, working, minimum-viable solution from ambiguous requirements: that's the point of the exercise. That's what hiring managers want in candidates because those candidates end up being good at building a concrete, working solutions from ambiguous requirements. Which is every software project ever. Although the AI Age has unquestionably changed the efficacy of this kind of candidate screening, that is orthogonal to this discussion. For many years it has been one of the most-effective ways to screen for the ability to build concrete, working solutions from ambiguous requirements. Which is every software project ever. So it's no surprise it persists.
Yes, software is full of ambiguities but there are methods we use to handle them. OP emailed an outline wanting feedback, as any team player would do to iron out ambiguities, and received a meaningless reply. I think it's safe to say companies don't want their engineers going into a corner never to be seen again for 2 weeks, which is what this interview process recreates.
OP didn't take into account the (great) asymmetry between themselves and the hiring manager, then built an entire lament on that. Dealing with this job req is likely just one of many day-to-day responsibilities the HM has and frankly I'm impressed they responded with three whole sentences. One method we can use to handle such ambiguity is to "make your best judgement" based on your skills, knowledge and experience (things that are tested for in the hiring process, incidentally), because often you may not get the answer you want or expect if any at all.
OP's proposal was only describing irrelevant stuff (the backend technologies) and was completely silent on on stuff that mattered (demonstrating how actual RFC822 email works, mutt-inspired UI). It was therefore accepted without comments, as there were no "substance" to comment on.
That is often a problem with proposals/design docs in general. In the real job, if proposal is actually required, it would be sent it back with "please add details on UX and how you are going to store email headers". In this case, the proposal was explicitly _not_ required though, so interviewers did not want to ask for more details on the optional document. They checked what was written there, found no problems, and approved it.
I think what has happened is the author has no idea what "email backend" was, so he just decided to ignore that part and build the only backend he knew, web-app backend. And those terms are pretty different. The "email backend" is the service which actually stores and transfers email, in the author's case it was turso + postman.
So from the interviewer's standpoint, author was asking about few details of implementation, like "can I use third-party service for email storage?"; and the response was of course "yes, you can" (because assignment was pretty clear that backend does not need to be advanced or even present, and that it's UI that matters)
I guess the question worked as intended, and filtered out candidate who cannot even read the simple requirements.
(The amount of effort was disproportional though, but I am not sure how to solve this in take-home context without discriminating against people who have busy schedules and/or work slowly)
Not what was expected of them. I included "minimum-viable" in my original reply for a specific reason: to counter OP's lament that they lost out to a simpler solution.
If you are asked to implement X and instead you take extra time and come back with X+Y+Z, what have you done? Wasted time e.g. money. Companies really hate wasting money.
So if in your candidate project you demonstrate a propensity for bike-shedding any task, that's gonna be a big red flag.
They explicitly asked for a minimal, terminal-inspired email client for their Email Backend Engineer role. OP built a ton of infrastructure, created a generic web app that has no semblance of terminal inspiration as far as I can tell, and outsourced the backend to third party APIs.
Concrete and working? Technically, yes. This would have been an excellent submission for a different assignment and role. But it doesn't seem to suit the specifications for this one.
This is the same thing that happened to me with an Expensify interview back in 2011. After that, I decided to only do interviews in person, or where the person was on a call with me. Take home tests are not worth the risk of this crap.
I went through something very similar — spent several days on a take-home assignment, took it seriously, carefully followed all the instructions and delivered everything.
Then I waited for two weeks, and all I got was a clearly templated response.
The worst part isn’t even the rejection — it’s the vague replies, or no reply at all.It just makes you feel like your time doesn’t matter.
Thank you for writing this. We really do need more people to speak up about these things.
I did a recent round of interviews and this experience closely mirrors mine (at multiple places). Delivered an exceptional solution to the problem only to be rejected without a discussion about the delivered project. I have been on the hiring end of take-homes multiple times and firmly believe that if you ask someone to do a take-home assignment you must follow up with a chat about the code. Apparently that's not the case at most places.
If you're asked to do a take home, I highly recommend confirming that there will be a follow up regardless of the assessment, and if they do not agree to this, do not do the "home work". The honest truth is that most of the teams hiring are of pretty low quality and therefore implementing a good solution is a negative because the team hiring is not at your level (which is a frustrating reason for being rejected).
I'm an early adopter of Kagi and am now planning on cancelling my account over of this. Completely unacceptable. If you don't have time to chat with a candidate about their work, don't ask them to do the work in the first place.
did they really deliver "exceptional solution" though?
Their solution seems to be nothing like "a minimal, terminal-inspired email client", and OP completely ignored the references to tools they were told to "take inspiration from"
When there is such bad misunderstanding of the requirements, I'd not waste time on the discussion either.
There was able opportunity for the hiring manager to point that out if that were the case. They specify questions where encouraged and then completely ignored the questions. If the HM doesn't have time to respond, then maybe take-home as first filter is not a good decision.
Were there? The question clearly said, "build a minimal, terminal-inspired email client" and "take inspiration from existing terminal email tools like aerc, mutt". Candidate completely ignored that part and built a tool which is nothing like terminal email at all.
Would any of their emails give a hiring manager idea that the candidate failed to understand the assignment in such a gross way?
Email 1, "What kind of extra feature do you value highly"
Interviewer thinks: "UX improvement could be VI-like megacommands, "pretty UI" must mean creative use of colors and font attributes, privacy-related must be encryption at rest... It's all good, we are happy to look at all of those!"
Email 2, "A webapp with golang accessible online, deployed through AWS using ECS Fargate, with SSL (https), integrated with an email sender provider, with authentication through a login screen, with the ability to send emails through a form, and displaying incoming emails in the user interface."
Interviewer thinks: "OK, that's a lot of implementation details.. Not sure why candidate feels the need to confirm that, but nothing in the list above will be graded as a negative. The important things we care about are that it's inspired by terminal apps like mutt, and that "it should feel fast and intuitive" and one can totally do that using technologies above"
Without seeing the screenshots/mockups, how would one even guess that the candidate was so off?
> Interviewer thinks: "OK, that's a lot of implementation details.. Not sure why candidate feels the need to confirm that"
Really? My email states explicitly why I want to confirm that:
> I would like to know what kind of response I could expect from Kagi if I drive it to completion.
Are you forgetting that the entire transaction implies a lot of work for the candidate?
Are you forgetting that candidate is doing this to land a job?
Do you think the candidate is writing a design document just for fun?
Your subtext implies that I should have guessed the grading, which is quite mind-blowing.
Remember, the instructions mention a web app as an option, the role is for a web-based company, and if my design document did not meet any of the key aspects they could have brought it up and rejected my proposal.
If you read the assignment, you can see that the majority of tasks is about UI and user-facing features ("Should have basic email viewing + sending functionality", "Does not have to handle rich text messages, just plaintext", "take inspiration from existing terminal email tools like aerc, mutt, or even something like himalaya.", "It should feel fast and intuitive")
The assignment had exactly 1 line about actual back-endy stuff: "Can use a fake backend (DB, in-memory, etc) or real ..."
Now, what did your email asked for? There was a whole bunch of things about back-endy stuff, and exactly 1 (one) sentence about the user-visible things, the thing they cared about the most:
"The UI will be kept simple, showing pagination for sent and received emails. In addition to the requirements of the assessment, there will be a login screen and two accounts"
So maybe you intended this to be a complete design document, but it actually was not. This is because it did not actually did contain any parts the interviewer cared about. And that's one of the reasons why you got no feedback - you could do _anything_ for the backend and they would likely still accepted that, they simply did not care if you used Pulumi or terraform or "start.sh" or "docker compose up"
And no, you don't need to guess the grading, you just need to read the assignment carefully. What do they seem to want? What kinds of things do they mention a lot? What kind of things do they mention in passing?
The HM answered, it was just not what the author wanted:
> That is part of the assessment itself, see what kind of extra features you can come up if any
It seems like the author wanted to hear something more like "ok, here’s a list of things we want you to implement, and here’s mock-ups for the UI, and here’s the API spec you can follow". How I’m reading the HM’s response is - I should spend a few minutes trying out the email clients they mentioned or watching videos on them, and come up with a list of their features. Apply my own judgement to say which ones are most important and roughly estimate the time it will take to implement a PoC for the assignment. At this point you could take that to the HM and say "hey, I think I can do X, Y, Z features within the timeframe. I’d like to have W, U, V, features in the client but I think they’re less important and I won’t have time. Since this is a backend position I will focus on the API and the client will be a thin wrapper around that. Does that sound good?". They will probably say yes and maybe throw in a "when you do X feature think about users that have 100k unread emails in their inbox", and you’ll get a gold star for "dealing with ambiguity". If I was the HM I would expect some amount of back and forth like this. Since the guidelines are so broad you can focus in on the areas you are most familiar with and keep the rest super simple. As far as we know the author sent the one email on March 18 including a lot of details about what dependencies they were going to use but no product or clarifying questions after that, which the HM might have happily answered. They also both went past the deadline set by the company AND their own self-imposed later deadline from their own proposal.
At the end of the day this is a startup and so it makes sense that what they’re looking for is someone who can work independently. They won’t have a PM to come up with the spec and list of requirements for you every time, and an architect who hands you the perfect software design, and they need you to be able to apply your own judgement and look ahead so that if you are designing their backend and 6 months down the line users ask for drafts support, you don’t come back with "sorry I didn’t account for drafts in my data model because no one told me, we can’t support that without redoing the whole thing".
It sounds like this actually worked fine as a filter for both the author and the company, just that the author realized too late in the process that this was not the work environment they were looking for. A phone screen or whatever else would've just been additional time spent for both the company and the author. I also don't think it's the company's fault that the author put in a "full work week" of hours, as far as we can tell that was never the expectation.
> I have been on the hiring end of take-homes multiple times and firmly believe that if you ask someone to do a take-home assignment you must follow up with a chat about the code.
That’s actually a very valid point. Take-home assignments not only require a significant amount of effort from the person administering them but also from the interviewer (or rather, the hiring team). After investing the time and effort in reviewing a project, it’s reasonable to expect feedback/a response back if requested.
However, we must also acknowledge certain realities. If there are 20 solid candidates for a single open position, many capable individuals will be rejected. This doesn’t imply that they were inadequate or even “failed.” It’s simply a reality of life.
Now to be asked to justify why a hiring manager picked A and not B, legally speaking, cannot be that I had to pick one out of the amazing candidates, so I picked one. The legally correct response (unfortunately) is to get nit picky and find faults where none really exists. At least, that has been my observation in how corporate America likes to operate. And last time I checked, Kagi is based out of Palo Alto.
> if there are 20 excellent responses for a single open position, many capable individuals will be rejected.
I would never ask 20 people to do a take-home assignment. There are so many better ways to test team fit before asking someone to commit serious, unpaid, time to a project. Historically speaking a 30 minute chat with someone provides a surprisingly good amount of information to anyone experienced in hiring.
But if you want to commit 20 people to take-home assignments, then block off 20 hours next week for 1-on-1s to chat with them about those assignments. If that sounds like too much, then don't find a better way to filter down the number of people doing homework until it feels manageable.
> If there are 20 solid candidates for a single open position, many capable individuals will be rejected.
And yet, the role is still advertised 1.5 months after my rejection, which means they are still getting emails from new candidates applying for the role. Do you suppose they get so many competent candidates that they can't make a decision on whom to hire?
At this point we can only speculate about their intentions, because the intentions are definitely not transparent.
I agree. The company should have either published clear guidelines on how the project would be assessed or provided some feedback on what could have been done better. It's okay to fail an assignment, but it's not acceptable to waste someone's time without offering anything in return. There are many companies, including pop startups, that handle this well.
Very insightful idea here. If you work in software, requirements engineering is a key task. Figuring out “would this deliver for you?” is a key question you hash out with clients.
But the absurdity of take home work like this is the company feels obliged to keep their requirements secret. Thus, by doing the task not knowing if it will be up to spec, you compromise on your most important skill!
My first though on looking at the code, and then on demo video was: wow, it took that person a solid week to write a web app with two pages.. all while missing the most basic email features, like an ability to opening a message (and not just show full text of mail bodies on one page).
Later on I read the requirements... This person applied to a position named "Email Backend Engineer" but they actually used a third-party product (postmark + turso) for email backend! They also clearly don't think about email too much - the basic stuff, like plaintext email formatting, viewing, and folders (at least inbox + outbox) are simply missing; while there are optional features, like login screen, admin page and backend framework. And backend database does not even containing a email headers map!
That person might be a great engineer, but I don't think they would be a good fit for that specific position. I'd reject them as well.
(A separate question is that hiring manager's second response... We don't do take-home interviews, but I imagine I'd be stumped by a proposal like that, it seems so irregular in a take-home assignment. Still, I can see how the candidate took that response for an approval... perhaps a next candidate would get an extra sentence perhaps something like "actual problem grading would depend on the code quality, number of features implemented, and how close those are to requirements and job description")
Update: read original job description and not just the except from the blog. That person surely omitted some stuff in their blog! the original title was:
"The project is to build a minimal, terminal-inspired email client"
it gave examples:
"Your implementation should take inspiration from existing terminal email tools like aerc, mutt, or even something like himalaya."
wow! that's 100% no hire, serious inability to read the requirements.
- Email client can either be in the terminal (i.e. a TUI) or a web app
- Should have basic email viewing + sending functionality
Seems like both were more than met to me.
Inspiration from existing tools is subjective. I would have assumed that spending time on the UI for a backend position was not the best way to show off my skills in a take home test.
The 2nd line of assignment, "The project is to build a minimal, terminal-inspired email client".
I agree that "inspiration" can be subjective, but in this particular case the solution was so much off that it'd be hard to argue otherwise. There is nothing terminal-like in it, and the tool is not usable as an email client either. Instead of doing login screens and user management, author should have made a page to view individual email or added folder (just 3, inbox/sent/trash, would already be a great improvement)
And if you want to ignore the requirements and work off position description... the position is titled "Email Backend Engineer", and the candidate's solution offloads actual email operations (storage, transfer) to third-party services. I suspect that even if candidate provided the same UX, but would have backed it with SMTP, IMAP, TCP/IP (not via http library), DNS MX lookup, resilient storage etc... then they might have passed.
But author failed to do either serious front-end work (required by question) or serious back-end work (required by job posting), so result was entirely predictable.
For every comment in this thread that says the author did too much, there is another saying the author clearly did not do enough.
Plenty of comments here have strong, but conflicting, opinions about which set of features are obviously in or out of scope. That alone indicates to me that this is a badly worded take home test.
Even ignoring that, the author told Kagi exactly what they were going to do in advance.
Applicant: I'm going to spend a week building X
Kagi: Sounds great!
Applicant: After a week, I have built X
Kagi: Not at all what we are looking for. Rejected.
I don't see any way to interpret this interaction positively.
That is the point. The difficulty of take-home assignment as a second screen is meant to increase with the number of candidates applied so that after this screen, you always end up with 4-5 that you can then interview in a meaningful way.
If only 10 candidates applied, take home could be a 5 min task. If 50 apply, you need something that will leave only those that are really commited to working at Kagi and ready to go an extra mile (and we may be looking for resourcefulness and determination as desireable traits, given how ambitious and difficult Kagi's core mission is).
I don't see much disagreement in the comments here? However there seems to be some people who only read the blogpost and did not actually follow the link to the original assignment [0].. you can tell their response by the lack of mention of "terminal inspired" features. Sadly this happens during discussions sometimes, especially when original author did not mention all the relevant facts in the post.
anyway, the exchange went like this:
Kagi: "please build terminal-inspired email client, you can choose which email flows you'd like to implement."
Applicant: I am going to spend a week building it, using golang, AWS, TMPL etc... I am also going to fit it onto 2 html pages.
Kagi: Sounds great!
Applicant: After a week, I have built something using golang, AWS, TMPL etc.. It has nothing to do with terminal, and does implement any of the email flows completely.
Kagi: Not at all what we are looking for. Rejected.
I don't see any way to blame Kagi for that exchange. Who would have thought the candidate decided to ignore half of the requirements?
Still, as a candidate, it sucks that they worked for hours and only got a rejection with a templated message. At least tell me the reason why you don't like my work, so I can learn something from it!
I get it that it's not always realistic to do, especially if the hiring manage reviews hundreds of applications for a hot role. But that's why take home assignment sucks. Some candidates may waste hours of their lives for nothing. Both sides need to be respectful of other people's time.
Yikes, I love Kagi but if I'd applied for this position and they gave me this assignment, I'd have told them to take a hike. This isn't an afternoon project, it's a full weekend. Maybe two. And are you supposed to be writing tests and stuff for this?
Moreover, this exercise tells you so little about the candidate and their experience. Sure, you know they can code (or did they just use Cursor?) but you have no idea whether they are good and addressing prompts and not at making wise choices. Who cares if the program can send email? What matters is that the client doesn't choke after 10k messages are received or that unicode is handled well: that's the sort of actual challenges you'd be doing at a company like Kagi, not making enormous toy projects.
Edit: Despite that, it seems like a bold choice for the author to build a web app instead of a TUI like the instructions lay out. One could say "terminal inspired" could include web applications but I think that's a stretch.
To be fair, they do explicitly say "build a minimal, terminal-inspired email client" and then "Email client can either be in the terminal (i.e. a TUI) or a web app" below, so even if it's a web app, they expected it to be terminal inspired, especially from the next paragraph in "Inspiration":
> Your implementation should take inspiration from existing terminal email tools like aerc, mutt, or even something like himalaya.
You can totally do terminal-inspired web app - http://www.coboloncogs.org/ is an extreme example, but for this assignment, even fixed-width font and compact layout would likely be enough.
Of course the OP in this post did nothing even close to that.
No, my assumption is that actually reading and following the requirements would increase the chance of the interview. It's like that Van Halen brown M&M Story - something that is simple to implement, but shows that the candidate actually read the requirements. Because after all, who wants to work with a person who just ignores half of the requirements they were given?
While we are talking, I was actually always wondered about candidate responses like that...
There is that spec, which starts with "minimal, terminal-inspired email client", and contains specific references to the products you want to imitate. Line 3 even explicitly says "Can use a fake backend", and to me, this shows pretty clearly that they don't care about backend, they need UI.
And then there is your submissions which basically has no UI to speak of. It's not even "minimal", as the basic features (like new mail indicator) are missing. Also, in no possible world you can call this "terminal inspired", it's 100% generic web app.
How on earth did you expect this submission to work, given the assignment they sent you?
Did you just skip over the original page and then forgot about it immediately?
Or did you read it, decided that "terminal-inspired web pages cannot possibly exist" and proceeded to implement completely different thing? In that case, why didn't you mention this in email ("and btw, I am going to ignore the part where you said I should build terminal-inspired email client because I think it's stupid.")
Or maybe you read the requirements, and randomly declared half of them "useless fluff" and decided not to implement them?
I understand that their responses were very minimal and not helpful, but it clearly says in the requirements to make a "terminal-inspired" email client. However, in the video you shared [1] I see a somewhat generic email web app, with nothing particularly "terminal-inspired". Considering the fact that they wanted either a real TUI or a webapp, I'm pretty sure that the web app should've also been "terminal-inspired". Am I missing something? I'm not trying to necessarily criticize you, perhaps I just misunderstood the requirements.
Edit: I've actually checked the full requirements page, and they explicitly say this in "Inspiration":
> Your implementation should take inspiration from existing terminal email tools like aerc, mutt, or even something like himalaya.
Yeah, a clearer explanation in the rejection email would have been nice, or perhaps even a warning in response to the proposal (though it's not 100% clear from the proposal alone that OP would be going down a path that ignores that part of the assignment.) But the prompt explicitly lists other terminal clients as the inspiration.
Also, the prompt for a terminal client really changes what they're testing! Email web UIs have been a known quantity for years. But the UX of a terminal client is still something that's not "solved." I suspect the rubric for the question has large sections about how they decide to make a terminal client that OP's submission doesn't address at all
Also they seem to put emphasis on Go programming, which takes < 20 lines to get a cli running so not sure why they chose a browser GUI, which is arguably much more work.
> We receive a lot of interest and applications for each position at Kagi which makes selection processes is extremely competitive.
This is the real take away. Don't put in outsized effort at companies that are highly subscribed. Everyone prides themselves on being "extremely competitive" and unless it's a FAANG (or well known quiet money fountain like Valve), it's probably not actually worth the effort.
If it's hot on HN, it's highly subscribed -- you just can't expect effort to be valued the same way when there are 10 applicants.
> We normally don’t provide feedback at this stage. We have had other submissions that were simpler and stronger, so we decided to continue forward with these candidates.
This would have been a great place to push and ask for a little more feedback (while being nice as possible since they have nearly no incentive to share more)... How could the other solutions have been simpler and "stronger" (whatever that means? more robust?) -- a few details on what you missed that they were looking for (tests? documentation? CI?) could at least add some value.
All that said -- finding a job is really hard right now. Wish you the best.
Honestly, you lost it with your first email asking for more direction, and every email after that just made it worse.
This was part of the assignment:
> This project tests your ability not only to code, but to deal with ambiguity and open-endedness, which is essential in R&D projects like Kagi Labs.
It was vague on purpose, they wanted to see how your decision making process goes with what you fill in the blanks with, without needing hand holding. You seemed to ignore this critical piece and went further and further against it with each message.
My honest feedback below from the perspective of a hirer. I'll start by saying I hate takehome stuff, for exactly reasons like this. It wastes everyone's time. They're fine as a 'last step before hire' thing, but not as a filter.
1 - Too much chatter. Part of the assignment is using judgment and working in ambiguity. I probably would have ran with what was given enough to knock out something small and local in an evening or two. Asking questions is usually fine, they even welcomed it, but seems counter to the original ask.
2 - Writing and sharing a proposal seemed like way overkill. You have to remember that these companies are now getting hundreds if not thousands if not tens of thousands of applicants, that is a lot to deal with if everyone does so. I think it's a bit of a disconnect...you feel like you're going above and beyond and being thorough, they feel like it's being a bit long winded and wasting time.
That probably explains the nonresponse.
3 - The finished product seemed functional, but seemed a bit overkill on the infra and polish. This is probably a good thing to work with you, but ended up wasting a lot of your time if not being selected, which was the case.
4 - Maybe I missed something, but the requirement asked for terminal inspired. I'm not quite sure precisely what they meant by that, but didn't see any possible interpretation of that in the result.
Anyways, hope you don't take it too negatively or personally - you obviously are a talented individual and moreso seem to really care about your work. Just wanted to play a little devil's advocate with a different perspective.
This is the problem. Your guess is different from the author's guess, because nothing is explicitly stated.
For others who did not click the link, the explicit requirements are:
> - Email client can either be in the terminal (i.e. a TUI) or a web app
> - Should have basic email viewing + sending functionality
> - Can use a fake backend (DB, in-memory, etc) or real IMAP/POP/JMAP/etc backend
> - Does not have to handle rich text messages, just plaintext
> Your implementation should take inspiration from existing terminal email tools like aerc, mutt, or even something like himalaya.
It should feel fast and intuitive, and you can choose which email flows you'd like to implement.
The word "keyboard" does not appear. Inspiration from X, Y, and Z is entirely subjective, and you should not be punished for not reading the interviewer's mind.
Is it not clear that every single one of the example apps the spec cites are text-based UIs, as in curses-style, monospace text, and (yes) keyboard-driven?
My takeaway from that is that if you don't make an app that is (quote) "in the terminal (i.e. a TUI)" but choose to make a web app, then it should look at act like a TUI.
What I got from that is "fast and intuitive" is the must have. When you have a choice (backend bit), justify you decision. I'd try to use that to stand out or an additional cool feature. When I have to do such homework, I do the requirements to what I think an above average candidate would, they've seen this a million times, then add 1-2 bits of flair/coolness only a handful of people would do to pique their curiosity and want to ask about the next round
In other words, the author did a good job but failed because there was an implicit requirement to not try very hard.
> Part of the assignment is using judgment and working in ambiguity.
If trying to clarify requirements is not what they wanted here, they may as well ask candidates to pick a number between 1 and 10 and reject anyone who guesses wrong.
> overkill on the infra and polish
I know its an opinion, but hard disagree on both. Take home tests are intended to show off your ability. Without specific guidance, how can anyone guess how much showing off is expected?
Polish is only bad if it stops you from delivering. Rejecting something that was delivered for being "too polished" feels like you are saying someone did too good of a job.
---
In my opinion tests with vague requirements like this are more likely to be a different way of rejecting people who are not a "culture fit".
I think it's pretty obvious to figure out how much polish is "too much". This is a business. Engineers time is limited. Was the time you spent on that more valuable than the alternative? I'm leaving the question of what the alternative was ambiguous on purpose.
What they were looking at was not the code, but the attitude. They likely don't want an engineer with a propensity to do too much, unless it's a 100x coder who can do "too much" with a lightning speed. Usually they want he candidate to show the ability to quickly do as much as needed, and not more, and, crucially, to understand how much is needed.
So yes, this is a culture fit test as much (if not more) as a design and coding test. Some people who are great at design and coding would fail it, and it's how this filter is intended to work.
Yes, I needed a ridiculous number, a picture of the coding faculty so strong that writing twice as much code as the task really needs is hardly even noticeable.
The author did a bunch of things that were irrelevant to the product (deploying to Fargate using Pulumi) while not delivering on the basic features that they were asked for ("terminal inspired email client"). If you watch the video it’s a super basic web app that has nothing to do with the TUI apps Kagi named you should use as inspiration. There’s no drafts. No CC or BCC field. No folders or labels (including sent or trash!). No replies. No threads. No shortcuts. There’s not even an indication of whether an email has been read or not. In terms of features it is very very very barebones, and I’m sure if you asked a few users all or most of these would be table stakes. Yes we can agree that "terminal inspired" is very open to interpretation, but spend a few minutes using the apps they gave as reference and you should be able to come up with a long list of features besides "send & receive email", which is the main thing they demonstrated. I get this is a short challenge, so pick a handful of things that are quick to implement and focus on those (like unread markers). You can even say this is a backend position so the UI shouldn’t matter, so then just implement them in the backend and make the simplest UI for it you can! They certainly "delivered" a product but I would not call it polished, and I would not confidently say this was a "culture fit" rejection - I see plenty of other reasons
The hiring manager above thought it was too polished, but you think it is not polished enough.
> There’s no drafts. No CC or BCC field. No folders or labels (including sent or trash!). No replies. No threads. No shortcuts. There’s not even an indication of whether an email has been read or not. In terms of features it is very very very barebones
None of these were asked for. Your guess as to what the true requirements are completely different from the authors, and others in this comment section.
Everyone seems to have different opinions on why the author failed. No one should have their time wasted on a take home test destined to be rejected because they guessed wrong.
And in this case, the author explicitly asked if they were on the right track before spending time on the test. Kagi had the opportunity to reject early or nudge the author back in the expected direction. Instead they wasted everyone's time.
I don't see how this can be interpreted in a positive way.
The candidate here focused on the wrong things, causing it to be overly focused in some areas while ignoring the main task which revolved around creating an interface inspired by a specifically listed set of terminal mail applications. So, yes it was both polished and unpolished simultaneously.
The attitude of the blog writer in their interactions also feels off. Just reading this blog post makes me think that this person is difficult to work with, requires extremely clear guidelines and instructions, and has a hard time making their own decisions. Maybe this is a good fit for a large, established company, but startups have their own needs.
"Create a terminal inspired email client so we can do an alpha test with some customers" is a reasonable ask for an engineer at an early stage startup. Of course, there would be a bit more specification, but a lot of the details would still be up to the engineer. This applicant wants more certainty than they can get.
This is illustrated by the line: "I would like to know what kind of response I could expect from Kagi if I drive it to completion." This is not a great request to make. There's no way they can answer that question, because there is no certainty available. They're probably getting a few hundred or a few thousand more submissions to evaluate.
Yes on this: It reminds me of when candidates ask me how they did at the end of the interview. It shows an extreme lack of decorum and empathy. What if you did terribly and I wouldn't hire you in a million years? Do you really want me to tell you that?
There's no good answer and asking a question like that shows real narcissism imo.
Conversely, if you can't handle some straightforward feedback to a candidate that took the time to interview you without violating decorum or hurting their feelings, then how can I expect you to be a good manager or supervisor? How are you possibly going to be able to handle minor personnel conflicts or provide guidance during the training period? It comes across as a complete lack of basic managerial skills.
Okay, but basic interpersonal skills are a prerequisite for anybody in a senior or team lead position, or any position that will involve code reviews.
I'm sympathetic to how awkward it can feel to provide honest feedback to a candidate, but look: we're all people here. I think we forget that sometimes when we're assembling hiring processes. As a candidate, you need some kind of feedback mechanism that allows you to improve even if you're not a good fit for a particular organization. And if you're involved in the hiring process in any way, you ought to be equipped to handle that.
> you need some kind of feedback mechanism that allows you to improve even if you're not a good fit for a particular organization
"Need". That is a strong term. I disagree. It would be nice, but it is not a need.
This topic has been discussed ad nauseam on HN. In most companies, there is specific company policy that prohibits providing feedback to candidates. There is literally no upside for these companies to provide feedback to candidates that they reject (except Fake/Feel-Good Internet Points, only redeemable on HN forums). Really: There is no way around it, no matter how many tears are spilled about it on HN.
> In most companies, there is specific company policy that prohibits providing feedback to candidates. There is literally no upside for these companies to provide feedback to candidates that they reject
This is the long and short of it.
In the US at least, discrimination laws are expansive. You can -very- easily end up saying something that violates this and putting your company at risk, no matter how good hearted you were attempting to be.
How do you "accidentally" end up saying something that implicates you in discrimination on the basis of legally protected characteristics - what are some examples of that?
This has always felt like an excuse used by people who who just don't want to be caught in their own lies when asked to come up with a real, non-discriminatory reason.
Part of it is, if anything can be taken slightly out of context to imply something discriminatory, there are those who will abuse the system and sue. At a large enough scale this can become a real problem. If the company policy is "never say anything" there's nothing to be taken out of context, reducing the chance of a lawsuit.
I bet you this comes back to insurance, as many things do in the corporate world. Sufficiently large companies probably have insurance coverage for discrimination lawsuits, or at least employment disputes in general. The coverage probably costs less if you have a "no feedback" policy.
> How do you "accidentally" end up saying something that implicates you in discrimination on the basis of legally protected characteristics - what are some examples of that?
Say you say it was for failure to meet a specific performance standard (because that is the documented reason); then the ex-employee has a starting point for an discrimination claim by looking for evidence that trnds to support the claim that people who differ on some protected-from-discrimination axis who failed to meet that standard were not fired. No reason given, no starting point. In theory, this policy helps make false nuisance claims more work and less likely, but a substantive reason for it is that HR knows that they cannot eliminate all prohibited acts by managers that would create liability, so making it harder to get a starting point for gathering evidence is important to prevent valid claims from materializing. HR policy does not exist to protect employees from unlawful treatment, it exists to protect the company from liability for such treatment. Sometimes thise two interests align, but when it comes to information about firing decisions they do not.
There’s similar things that can be done with other prohibited reasons for dismissal, loke retaliation; but the idea is any information you give makes it easier for them to make a case against you.
This is also, in reverse, why, as a departing employee (whether departing voluntarily or not), you should never participate in an exit interview or, if you must as a condition of some severance or other pay or benefit, never volunteer any information beyond the bare minimum necessary; one significant purpose of such interviews is to document information useful either for potential claims against you or to defend against any potential claims you might have, including those you have not yet discovered, against the company.
The other comments gave good answers. A lot of people think it means saying something horrible and racist or something, but not at all.
As one pointed out, there's a "well you said it was X, but person Y who got hired did that too. And they're a different race or gender or religion, so that leads me to believe discrimination."
There's also you trying to be helpful, saying something along the line of "well you hesitated a bit and sounded unsure in your answers", only to find out they have some disability that caused that and now have admitted you're discriminating based on it.
Maybe you'll say "well, if I had known, I wouldn't have noticed it or cared." And a lot of candidates would likely say as much up front. But they don't have to tell you about it at all. See how that creates a weird dynamic?
Is it common? Probably not. But it obviously happened or else such rules wouldn't exist. It's one of those things that the bad actors ruin it for everybody. Bigots are never going to admit their reasons - good people will. But bad people will always try to take advantage, regardless.
I think it's more of a case for legal and HR being conservative and super defensive. Not sure if you've ever handled a contract with an internal lawyer, but in my experience they often go for crazy suggestions that the other side would never accept for the sake of protecting the company as much as possible. Might be the same here - HR/legal being super protective and the hiring manager not caring enough to fight back.
This is simply a defense of bad policy couched in unnecessarily dehumanizing language.
There is widespread resentment of this and many other common hiring practices in the tech sector, and that is further impacting both the quality of candidates as well as employee motivation and satisfaction. The upside for companies is higher quality candidates whose first experience with the company is a hiring process that makes the candidate want to work there.
I broadly agree with this being an unfortunate outcome but you do understand that making candidates who failed your interview want to work at your company is fundamentally limited in how much it actually helps you. Yes, yes, I know some of them may come back and pass the next time, or they tell their friends about how you were super nice and gave them great feedback, but this is pretty rare. If you're doing this, you're doing it out of the goodness of your heart, not because it helps your recruiting pipeline. And, even though I agree with the idea of providing feedback, assuming that people will have positive feelings when you tell them why you didn't accept them is misguided. I have friends who I know personally that have gotten interview feedback and not taken it well. Of course I tell them to shut up and stop poisoning the well for everyone else, but the point is that this is largely not the picture you are presenting it as.
Sorry, I wasn't clear. Providing constructive feedback to a candidate is unlikely to have a direct positive impact on the relationship between that specific candidate and that specific company. It's more of ... whatever the opposite of the tragedy of the commons is. A policy that, if improved, would broadly improve the quality of many candidates for many companies.
Companies have been optimizing for candidates that are an immediate ideal cultural and technological fit. They are all competing for candidates that are the idealized developer, with perfect social skills, a brilliant CV, and deep technical experience that is an exact match for whatever the company is doing at the moment.
That's fine and rational and all, but a necessary consequence of this is that that pool is quite small and there are lots of companies competing for those people. Meanwhile, there are a lot of very good candidates who are underemployed because they aren't getting the opportunity or resources needed to become those idealized employees. This is a game theory outcome where both parties are optimizing themselves into a losing position.
I've been employed in this industry, off and on, for a long time. I assure you that companies didn't always behave this way. There has been a clear, obvious, and severe decline in the hiring experience, and these policies are hurting the entire industry.
It's generally socially frowned-upon to go on a couple of dates with someone and then ghost them. It happens, but it's not considered good practice. We recognize that it's cruel but also leads to a more cynical, detached, overall worse dating experience for everyone. Saying "I don't think this will work out, you seem nice but you're not what I'm looking for right now" is difficult and awkward, but it's also a necessary skill that needs to be maintained. Sometimes people don't react well, but that doesn't make it less necessary: it closes a feedback loop that ultimately allows earnest people who are looking for relationships to learn and grow and become better candidates for the next relationship.
I agree, but my point is that the tragedy of the commons here is more divorced than usual. Companies can barely understand that doing layoffs hurts morale, and that connection is really easy to demonstrate. Trying to convince them that taking on some liability for a slightly better applicant pool seems difficult.
Who are you trusting as a technical interviewer if you don't already trust them to give negative feedback internally?
Do you not code review? Are you a rubber stamp "LGTM" shop that should just be pushing to main but cargo culted the ceremony because github has it built in?
> What if you did terribly and I wouldn't hire you in a million years? Do you really want me to tell you that?
Yes, that sounds like extremely valuable feedback.
Why do you suppose asking a question like that shows narcissism? To me it shows a willingness to infest feedback to improve.
I will add the caveat that if someone asked me that in an interview I would likely give a non-answer because I’m not totally sure what all I’m even allowed to say.
I had someone email me after being rejected at the final round of an interview. "Everything seemed to mesh just perfectly, and I'm at a loss to understand."
I broke it down for them. "This was nothing to do with you, and we would have had no objection to hiring you. However, the candidate who beat you out simply had more domain experience in XYZ area" and went on to say "For what it's worth, we had 500+ applications, of which we in-depth reviewed 100 resumes, had 40 first-round interviews, 15 second-round, and three final round."
They emailed me back to express appreciation and that though this didn't work out, it renewed their confidence to know they didn't "mess something up".
Since then, if we're at that point in a process and I'm rejecting you, I'll at least give you something to work with.
This is so important for people to understand, and its why I give people feedback.
People, being humans and prone to pattern seeking, assume that if they didn't get the job, it's something specific they did, or failed to do.
And sometimes, that's true. But for a lot of candidates, it just came down to another candidate being slightly better, or slightly cheaper, or some combination of value markers.
A lot of my interview feedback comes down to "I don't see any reason you wouldn't be a good fit, but we have other interviews and it's going to come down to value."
Some people will take this as me saying "Don't ask for what you're worth," or "we're gonna low-ball your salary." The reality is, we're a business, and if I can produce the same widget with person X or person Y and person X costs 10K less a year, I'm going with person X. Every time.
A simple request for feedback is not evidence of narcissism or lack of empathy. Could be anxiety. Could be curiosity. Could be zeal. Could be any number of things. It's certainly not an "extreme lack of decorum" though.
It's okay to avoid giving feedback if you don't want to. I can think of a few ways to answer that question in a neutral or positive fashion to defuse the situation and legally protect the company.
Really?? I always appreciated candidates that would ask that at the end - being willing to step aside from the pretense of professionalism to ask a real question and listen to my answer is a signal to me that this is someone who is willing to be real with me, not pretentious or perfunctory.
I do get what you’re saying, but I disagree, there is a good answer; and as is often the case, it’s an honest one.
Don't take this the wrong way, but I deliberately ask how I did because it helps me weed out interviewers who think like this. Not so much "how did I do?" as "now we're close to the end of the interview, do you think we're a good fit for each other?" I give my own feedback and talk honestly about points of friction.
I interview pretty well, but if I go into an interview with a company that wants hungry hustlers and I've spent the whole interview talking about kindness and team spirit, or if you think I don't know enough pl/pgsql to deal with your gnarly legacy backend, or I'm getting the vibe that none of the engineers seem to like working here, then we need to speak honestly about that.
No need. Just walk away. Remember: You are interviewing them, just as they are interviewing you. Any company worth its weight will not allow red flags to leak into the interview process, e.g., "getting the vibe that none of the engineers seem to like working here". So many times, I have reached the final round of an interview process, met the senior manager... and thought: "Barf, I don't want to work for that person. What a waste of my time."
I know I'm interviewing them. That's why we need to talk.
If they wanted to hire me enough to interview me, but at the end of a half-day of interviewing I'm going to walk away without a job, then they need to rewrite their position description so I know not to apply, deal with their morale problem, or directly ask me how much PL/pgSQL I've done. We both stand to benefit from talking about how the interview went.
But you also need to factor in their position in the situation right?
Like suppose they do hate their job. Do you expect them to speak that plainly and honestly to every candidate who asks "So how do you like working here?" and risk getting that posted to the front page of HN?
You're asking them to risk their own livelihood so you get a better signal for your own job search, that doesn't seem like a proportional trade to me.
Obviously I'm not advocating for complete opaqueness, but your interviewer is hardly ever in a good position to part with their true feelings towards questions like "How did I do compared to other candidates? How is it truly working here?"
I've basically almost always given direct and obvious non-answer to the first question: "I cannot tell you right now, because I'll need to write down and collate my thoughts. And I'm not allowed to share feedback directly, so your recruiter will be in touch with the feedback afterwards."
Not to mention there are legal liabilities with sharing interview performance with candidates. "Oh but the interviewers told me I did extremely well on their interviews. Therefore it must be the case that I was rejected because of ${protected attribute X}."
Yes we want to know. Framing this as an empathy issue when in reality you're just to afraid to be honest or afraid of any kind of conflict IS an empathy issue. At that point they're not a person. They're an annoyance that you want gone immediately.
> asking a question like that shows real narcissism imo.
Precisely the opposite. Asking for criticism and genuinely being interested in what others think of you with the goal of taking the feedback on board and improving is the polar opposite of typical narcissistic behavior. As far as I'm aware that sort of self-reflection is inherently incompatible with NPD.
Seriously? A candidate puts in a week of work and he can’t be guaranteed a 30 minute discussion?
Nobody is getting a few hundred or few thousand submissions to evaluate. Nobody. If you are getting 1k applicants, at best 50 are asked to do a take-home and even then, not all at once.
If by some miracle 100 people did this to completion at the same time, there should be a notice to the effect that due to high volume, blah blah blah.
…which is totally understandable… if the hiring manager had communicated that. They could’ve easily mailed back “Hi this proposal seems much more detailed than what we need for evaluation, please save yourself some time and energy.”
The author may have had issues (I personally don’t count “need clear instructions” as an issue - edit - I see they didn’t adhere to the TUI prompt), but the hiring manager definitely did.
> …which is totally understandable… if the hiring manager had communicated that.
I agree that the hiring manager could have handled it much better, but as a rule: If at any point during any hiring process you feel like you need to spend even close to a full time week of work on anything without being very explicitly told so, you are wrong.
I am a hiring manager and we do take home homeworks. I fully agree that this is a key piece of communication. I always take the time to tell candidates that although they have as much time as they want, we expect 2-3 hours of effort at most, to be respectful of their time.
Without that, take home problems would seem predatory.
In your comments history someone replied to a job posting "Just an FYI, if you do a takehome project for William, he won't respond to you (not even with an auto reject)."
Just to be clear, this wasn't my advice, it was written into the task description -
This project tests your ability not only to code, but to deal with ambiguity and open-endedness
I'm not sure how I feel about that to be honest. On one hand I get what they're shooting for in general by saying that. On the other, they're going to have some preconceived notion of what they want, and it's a bit of luck if you come close to that.
> And don't hesitate to tell us if you have any questions!
I personally have no problem dealing with "ambiguity and open-endedness" (and, in fact, enjoy it!), but my solution to this problem at every job that has had this issue is: talk to people and understand the problem.
Attempting to "mind-read" is the worst solution to ambiguity, and, in practice, nearly always leads to disaster.
It's not really culture fit. I've used the open ended test before and it was a good filter for "can they walk the walk". Just some basic text processing, but only few people cared to mention error checking, tested Unicode behaviour, included any documentation, etc. It's "will you do the usual things without explicit prompting". (The assignment explicitly said you can call them out as something to do without fully implementing to save time)
The best developers I've worked with have an uncanny knack for reading people's minds. (Of course, they are actually just really good at communicating and predicting what people want. But if you do it well enough it sure seems like mind reading.)
As a hirer, the kind of takehome assignment I like to give is one that:
* Can be completed in 30 minutes by a skilled programmer
* Has clear evaluation criteria, both objective and subjective
* Has multiple approaches that require making different tradeoffs
And of course, only give it to some candidates where the result will be make-or-break.
As someone who took one of these broad take-home assignments my last time looking for a job, I failed a the assignment for a job I was overqualified for because I was told I wasn't able to divine what parts of the extremely broad assignment I would be graded on.
I doubt I will be in a position where I get a job that isn't a referral for the rest of my career, but it really turned me off of these kinds of assignments, both taking and giving them.
Very curious: how do you deal with AI answers for those?
While writing my questions (and testing in my teammates), I found that "can be completed in 30 minutes by a skilled programmer" very often means "can be completed almost automatically by AI", and that AI will give explanations too, that interviewer could repeat during code review phase.
Every step in the process is a filter. You can ask them not to use AI and trust, you can ask them what tools they used (including AI) and for what part, you can ask the candidate to screen record them programming their solution and forbid using AI, you can ask them about their solution in a followup interview, etc.
It's kind of up to what you're filtering for, and how much you trust the candidate at that part of the process, and how you follow up after hiring.
IMHO, the author's approach of validating his ideas mirrors modern engineering workflows. Coders don't spend hours independently coding an MR and then getting feedback from prod, tech leads, QA, and UX after the feature is "finished."
Work environments that "code first, review later" have been some of the most toxic in my career. It really sucks when you spend days building a feature only to find its not wanted. Which is why explaining the feature in English and getting approvals is the industry standard for shipping projects.
This candidate followed modern software practices that healthy workplaces follow.
(I'm also a hiring manager at a 1k+ engineer company).
I found myself thinking the same thing - perhaps came from a bigger/more established company. Reminded me of the PRD/ERD process. And that's not necessarily bad.
But from my experience, the two types look at each other like the other is insane. If you write up an ERD at a scrappy 6 person startup, everyone is going to think you waste time.
Conversely, if you join a larger team with established processes and begin flinging code at the wall unabated, people are going to think you're reckless and possibly inexperienced.
I've worked in places with very strong product management, where every single detail must be approved by a PM. I've also worked in places where engineer has a lot of autonomy - "John from FOO dept is spending too much time wrangling the daily data updates. Can you help him, here is his email? Our higher-ups allocated two weeks for that, but we can extend this if needed." - and from then on, you are in full control of the design and implementation, subject to your team's rules (because no one wants a system with bus factor of 1).
For me, I've found that the latter places are much nicer to work in. The interview question seem to focus on latter situation too.
I don't know about everyone else, but as a dev who is currently looking for a job I simply cannot afford to devote a week of unpaid work to each application. It's not sustainable to say the least. Especially when I'm told by some people that getting rejected means I didn't spend enough time on the solution.
If the next guy puts in 10 hours, and you only put in 1 hour, assuming equal skill. Which project will be more polished?
If you are high skill and only work 1 hour on the project, but a newbie puts in 10 hours with ChatGPT's help, I'd be the newbie would have a pretty competitive project to the skilled 1 hour candidate.
You're not supposed to deliver a polished project, you're supposed to show what you can do and what you know. You can also document your process if you want, to let them know it only took you X hours to get to the solution you are presenting.
I had an interview once where they gave you 1.5 hours to code Tetris in ruby. I completed the core requirements and 1-2 extra requirements.
The person that got the offer coded 1-2 more extra features than I could in that time. What am I supposed to tell the interviewer?
"You're not supposed to get a polished project?"
If you're the interviewer, are you going to hire the guy that did just was asked or you are going to hire the guy that worked nights and weekends to get the perfect project delivered to you beyond what was asked?
And yet the over engineered solution that somehow took a week to complete fell completely flat. I'd guarantee that Kagi has hired developers through this process who only spent a couple hours on it. If I was working on this, I wouldn't have gone beyond three hours. It would have actually been a console app and I would have done something like integrate your unread mail count in your terminal prompt as some "bonus" demonstrating additional thought in the space.
I've worked with IMAP and POP libraries before so am familiar with the fundamentals for building a client and libraries in many languages make this part of the integration very straightforward. Couple that with a "modern" CLI library this should come together very quickly. And I would not have included half a dozen cloud services for a terminal like email client. The project submitted completely missed the mark and they still have no idea why.
If I wanted to create something by meticulously planning out every detail and spoon feeding them to a code monkey with no creative input I'd just use an LLM or outsource to India where you've got to spell out every little detail and still get questionable results back. I've had to do that plenty of times and I don't want to work like that. I want to work with other professionals who can run with a concept and deliver good results without constant oversight and micromanagement. That's clearly not the author of the blog post.
I think you might be missing the point of the blog post. The author is frustrated that he followed standard engineering practices (by submitting a proposal for approval). This proposal was perceived to be as accepted and then when they delivered.
The issue isn't his solution is incorrect. The issue is the company's said his solution was correct and then they rejected him anyways.
This is the equivalent of the interviewer telling you the brute force solution on a leetcode is good enough, but then rejecting you after the interview.
no, the company did not say that his solution was correct, that's just what the author thought.
The company said that _the parts he wrote in the doc_ would not negatively affect his scoring. But his doc did not contain many parts that the company cared about - read it yourself, and try to answer the questions like: Will there be a per-email indicator? Is there a "sent mail" folder? How will user be notified of incoming email?
Exactly. The position they are hiring for is not that of a coder; coding is just one of the skills the position requires, maybe not even the most important.
> (I'm also a hiring manager at a 1k+ engineer company).
I'm not a hiring manager, and I have worked at five different companies with at least 10K engineers. All of them were "code first, review later". All five companies were very profitable and technology was a core component to their commercial success.
I can’t speak for your specific jobs, but my understanding is this is standard practice at FANGA: write an RFC or Eng Spec. Get it approved. Code it up.
When I worked at unprofitable, small startups, a lot of mental energy was lost due to miscommunications before the MR review process. Eg an engineer would be tasked to complete a project, but misunderstood a critical component and only after n-days of work was this identified and corrected.
I've worked at large companies and I've worked at small ones (disclaimer: including Kagi, long ago). When I was at Google I wrote design docs for basically everything. The company I'm at has fewer than ten people. I rarely write design docs. This isn't because the workplace is any less healthy, but because there are fundamentally fewer people I need to communicate my changes to, and they have more context of what I'm doing.
Process is healthy at large companies, because they move slowly and communicating your changes often becomes far more important than the actual code that needs to be written. Kagi is a small company. It does not make sense to cargo-cult practices from a company a hundred times larger.
I think the huge proposal (after several rounds of questions) was what sunk him. The instructions did not request a proposal, and submitting one, especially one that detailed, conveyed “OP cannot take the initiative and proceed with work without seeking approval beforehand.” The project was about asking a few questions, listing a few assumptions, and giving yourself approval to confidently dive in and build something ambiguous. Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think the code mattered after that email was sent. The company should have just ended it there without him wasting his time building the assignment.
That's the blogger's point. The hiring manager saw the proposal, knew that wasn't what he wanted, and then proceeded to waste an entire week of the candidate's time while he was looking for income.
>This is two business days later than the two-week mark since you sent me your first email.
With no accompanying personal reason for the delay, it's already a rejection in my books. The objective was to design an appropriate solution within the deadline.
All these things are easy to say in hindsight. However, the same outcome could have happened if the opposite strategy were taken (Don't clarify requirements, do bare minimum); someone could just as easily post a response saying the candidate should have clarified requirements and gone beyond the bare minimum.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 311 ms ] threadTo standout, you have to be a bit creative and you must sustain yourself with your own company / startup. (4 basic instructions here) [0]
Companies do not care about you or your take home solution(s) unless you've built something that threatens their existence with a competing product that makes money and steals their users.
Stop playing by their rules with these interview 'games' unless you have lots of time. Spend your time elsewhere. You now have AI, and you should build a startup instead.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43212438
If this had been limited to 3 hours then the worst case is that the candidate would have lost 3 hours, but far more likely is that they would have come up with an entirely different proposal and/or solution that was appropriate for that timeline, and that extra information would have made it clearer what the company was looking for.
The other point I'd always encourage applicants to confirm is: are you looking for any answer, or are you looking for a good answer. Some take-home tests are purely about passing a test suite and how you manage it doesn't matter, some would prefer that you meet 80% of the requirements but write better code. I've seen applicants do the wrong thing on both sides of this.
Surely there must be other ways to have an idea on a candidate’s skills.
In our case, hiring people with data engineering skills, we just ask of them a simple ETL challenge (pull data from zip file, transform it, insert into any database). We leave ambiguities in there and there are some Easter eggs in the dataset (eg null values where you would not expect it, incorrectly formatted CSV) that we use to evaluate how well a candidate can perform.
We timebox it at 4 hours, but don’t give guidance in case they run out of time, that’s a good suggestion.
During a follow up call, we review the code together and we’ll ask them questions on how to improve the code (“what if the dataset doesn’t fit in memory”, etc), which is what the actual technical assessment is. At that point they should already feel somewhat comfortable with the problem domain, and you can assess their real skills.
People should be paid for the time they spend in interviews.
You make that the law and this ambiguous hoop jumping bullshit goes away real fast. Companies will optimize for cost instead of dumping cost onto the prospective employees.
This is good for the economy because it forces companies to innovate and optimize the interview process and it saves hundreds hours of totally economically unproductive time on the part of candidates.
I have a map of topics and questions, and I get the candidate chatting about their past projects, their approach, and what they liked/disliked about past projects and various technology they've used.
It takes a maximum of one hour and usually close to about thirty minutes to make a yes/no decision on a candidate (sometimes it only takes ten minutes to make a no decision, and then it's a matter of trying to politely end the interview).
I've interviewed hundreds of candidates this way over the years, and everyone I've hired has been capable of doing the job. Not once have I ever had to let someone go for lack of technical ability.
Part of the problem is that we don't train people how to conduct interviews, and another part is "this is how I was interviewed, so this is how I'm going to interview other candidates" -- pure inertia.
As an industry, we really need to do better.
As for the OP, _if_ I had been administering a vague take-home project that had a 1-week delivery deadline, and a candidate peppered me with Qs and then presented a full proposal for the project for approval, prior to working on it... I would have rejected them. But I'm pretty certain I would have decided to reject them in my regular 30-60 "chat" interview, and I would not have moved on to the take-home project and wasted their time like that. So, again, I fault the interviewer(s) for not being able to filter candidates efficiently.
At my current gig we do a 1-hour pair programming kind of thing, where we video-chat and watch the candidate work on a small, straightforward task. And as the interviewer I watch how they use the tools, where they go for docs, do they read the requirements, how do they test, etc. By the end I always feel like I have a strong picture of their ability, and the whole thing is capped at 90 minutes for both sides (adding time for their questions).
If the candidate's code was written offline beforehand, I'd have no idea whether it was theirs, whether it came from a friend or chatGPT, whether it took ten minutes or ten hours, etc. Sure I could try to suss out those things during discussion, but isn't it better to observe directly?
If it came from a friend or chatGPT, you'll learn that quickly because you can ask them stuff like "show me how you're implementing FOO. OK, if the requirements change, and now we need to BAR, what do you need to change across the app?" If they wrote the code and understood the task, they should understand what needs to change, how to do it, etc, and you can do that part with them live. Maybe someday LLMs will be fast enough that you can't catch someone constantly waiting for the AI to help them, at least as of May 2025 we're not there yet.
If they didn’t write it themselves, they will absolutely fail in the follow-up session where the real evaluation happens and I ask them to scale the code, handle crash safety without using transactions, etc.
(Even moreso if it's a fizzbuzz level task, I'd have thought - actual fizzbuzz being famous as a coding interview task, after all.)
Would you think doing this live in a screen sharing session adds more value? How would you prepare the candidate for this?
> Would you think doing this live in a screen sharing session adds more value?
In my experience, hugely yes. Above all else I really like that the time commitment is fixed on both sides - no homework for the candidate, and we're not asking them to invest any more time than we are.
Also doing things interactively gives a lot of leeway for adjusting and avoiding wasted time. If somebody's got one section basically solved, I might cut in and say "yeah that bit is great, let's call it finished and look at this other bit". If they're obviously having a lot of trouble, I might ask about their current work and maybe switch tasks if there's a better fit. Or if they're obviously coasting easily I might cut in with "how would you scale this?" questions that give more signal than watching them finish up the loose ends.
Another thing I like is that we can keep the task specification simple, like what you'd get from a PM, and it's up to the candidate whether they want to ask questions or jump in. I imagine that with take-home tasks you either need to give out pretty specific requirements, or else have people interpreting the task a variety of different ways.
> How would you prepare the candidate for this?
We explain at the beginning that the goal is write code for an hour and watch how they work, and there's no hard requirement for what needs to be finished by the end. And they're welcome to search the web, use AI, or anything else they'd typically do while working.
And I've only done a few dozen of these, but personally I've never seen anybody get particularly nervous. I think nerves are a bigger issue with HR style "pass all the tests within the time limit" tests, where the danger is that somebody can hit a wall and never get past it. That doesn't happen with my format, because if somebody is stuck I just give them hints until they're unstuck (since I get no signal from watching somebody scratch their head).
So I have to wonder, is this a junior position, or did too much hadoop rub off on me a decade and a half ago?
Because you can't guarantee all candidates are spending the same amount of time, it becomes a game theory problem where the candidates will typically lose in some form. In many cases, the right answer is to spend extra time making a really polished (but not too polished!) solution and pretend like you stayed in the time limit. And every candidate is either a) doing that, or at least b) worried that their competition is doing that.
Even if we ignore that dynamic, 3 hours is a long ass time for a candidate to spend when they're not even sure they'll get to talk to another human about it.
In a 1-hour interview, you can run a candidate through a programming exercise and be guaranteed they're not wasting extra time on it. And if they happen to prefer doing take home assessments, you can always let them send you an updated answer later. (But often by the time a candidate asks me if they can do that, I've already developed a favorable view of their skills and can tell them, "go for it if you want, but you've already 'passed' my test.")
By keeping the candidate-interviewer time investment the same, you guarantee that you're respecting the candidate's time as you would your own (because you're sitting there with them.) I can help them skip over the parts I'm not interested in (e.g., by feeding them info they'd be able to find via search or telling them not to worry about certain details.)
If a hiring manager doesn't respect their candidates' time, how likely are they to respect their employees' time?
In some cases we roughly timed it, scheduling an email for a time the candidate wanted and asked them to return it 3 hours later. In some cases we just treated it as an honour system. We made it clear that the task was intended to take about that much time and that spending more time was not allowed/encouraged.
In reality, we found that good candidates took ~1-2h, and in some cases where candidates spent a lot longer and owned up to it, we found no improvements. In one case a candidate submitted at 3h and then again at 8, and we marked the 8h version 1 mark lower.
When I see instructions that say “This project tests your ability not only to code, but to deal with ambiguity and open-endedness”, it actually means either a) this exercise has been so poorly conceived that we didn’t bother with a rubric or b) the work environment is so chaotic, we never clearly define specs or requirements for anything.
That, and the instruction to simultaneously “show off your skills” and deliver a pragmatic functional solution are completely at odds. Good simple solutions aren’t flashy.
What I want to see is an engineer implement an awkward bit of business logic. Does it become a million nested if statements and a "here be dragons" comment at the top, or do they identify the right patterns and build something that I can reason about when reading the code? This is far more valuable in the job, more signal in the interview, and much harder for AI to get right. It also takes less time.
I've been caught with this few times now. Spend ages trying to coerce AI to solve logic problem and end up just manually solving it myself. Whereas UIs are so good and usually near perfect from first prompt. I suspect it's the weak prompt. I need to learn and solve this before my brain completely atrophies (there must be Anthropic joke here somewhere hehe).
Business logic on the other hand is much more likely to be novel in some way, there are likely fewer similar examples for rules to be learnt from, etc.
Obviously this is all gradations, LLMs can manage some business logic and mess up some UIs (they can't "see" the UI which doesn't help!), but this is my experience of them and fits with my understanding of the technology.
> Good simple solutions aren’t flashy.
Maybe showing off your skills is making a good and simple solution?
Because the interview is meant to measure how well someone would perform on the work?
> You want to get the best signals of ability that you can, and one thing you can do to help that is to make sure that you’ve given an assignment that will be evaluated consistently on your end and understood uniformly by the participants
Well sure, all else being equal, but if the cost of consistency is an assignment that doesn't reflect the actual work environment then that may outweigh the benefit.
Doing two small tests toy can measure each skill independently
A clear coding test to get technical skill and then some in person requirements gathering exercise or something to measure ambiguity handling.
You’ll get better insight into their abilities with less effort for the interviewee AND the interviewer (if the startup is really that chaotic, do you really think they are doing a careful code review on a zillion different bespoke takehomes?)
Because the combination is what matters for the hiring decision, and a single test is a lot easier for everyone than two tests.
> You’ll get better insight into their abilities with less effort for the interviewee AND the interviewer
Disagree. It would always end up being approximately twice as much effort for both.
I mean, what if part of the role that’s being hired for is to help people clearly define the specs and requirements? I consider that a big part of what it means to be a senior software engineer.
Maybe this exact format isn’t the best way to test for it, but I don’t think “we want to see if someone can deal with ambiguity” means all the work is ambiguous. It might just mean all work needs to go through a process to take it from “ambiguous requirements” to “clearly defined specs”
Then I'd expect the interview process to focus on that process, not on the final deliverable. As it stands, the candidate tried to interact with the interviewer by trying to ask for clarification on the requirements, then making a detailed proposal, and got no actionable feedback from either.
I cannot really blame the interviewer for not reminding the candidate that they should actually follow the requirements, in addition to all the optional stuff they mentioned in their spec.
I have to be blunt, you have no idea what you are talking about. I am just going to say this: A terminal app is completely at odds with an online web client. If the interviewer is as clueless as you are, that explains two things:
- I was never going to pass the interview in the first place
- I was never going to get a reasonable conversation from this person, no amount of communication is going to solve incompetence from the interviewer's side
Corollary:
- Gross negligence from the company for assigning this interviewer
Nothing "at odds" here.. You can absolutely have fixed-size font, character grid based layout, and keyboard-based navigation.
Then they should have responded to his questions in email?
I personally love working on projects that are vaguely defined because it means getting to interact with people and understanding the heart of the problem. My favorite roles have involved reaching out to non-technical people and figuring out how to solve their problem. Often it's not the solution they even initially asked for.
But if your role is to guess about vague specs with no communication, then you're going to fail no matter how senior you are.
Anyways thanks for writing this up OP, it was an interesting read and I am a Kagi customer so I liked learning about them.
Not sure why OP makes no mention of this in their blog post - perhaps they thought those parts were unimportant? In which case I am not surprised at the results.
You can absolutely have terminal-inspired web apps, see http://www.coboloncogs.org/
The project was well made, but my read on it was that they wanted to be shown something interesting. Even if it wasn't as well made of polished, I got the impression they would have preferred something "fun" or imaginative.
- Title: Make something fun for the customer.
Then your performance review:
- Manager: We cannot tell you why, but you failed at your job.
I feel sorry for the author to have spent more time on actually doing the assignment after that reply.
During my college days, I had an on-campus interview with Microsoft that served as an assessment for whether I would be eligible for more in-person interviews in Seattle. The interview question was open-ended: “I would like you to design an alarm clock.” It seemed like an unusual open-ended question that prompted me to consider several critical factors, such as the intended audience, physicality, visibility, and audibility. By considering these factors and not immediately presenting a solution, the interview team informed me that I had passed the test. If they had provided me with more specific instructions or guidelines before the interview, they might have missed a signal that was important to them.
Unfortunately, I did not advance to the subsequent rounds at Microsoft. I interviewed during the fall semester. While I made it thru the full process, I was informed that I lacked confidence, but wasn’t a no. I was encouraged to reapply in the spring. The initial experience had left me drained and disheartened, so I decided not to pursue a second attempt. I now deeply regret this decision and wish I had given it another chance. If anyone is in a similar situation during their college years, I strongly advise them to avoid making my mistake. Working at a FAANG company could have changed my entire life and career trajectory.
The problem is not the lack of a "rubric", it is the sheer amount of effort expected from the candidate, especially related to the unprofessionalism of the response. This process is set up to waste a maximum amount of time from candidates without any sort of feedback, and no proof that a reward even existed.
How many dozens of people completed this assignment and got rejected? How many of those assignments were even reviewed by the manager? Did anyone actually get hired? "Giving details would make this less effective for the manager" doesn't begin to excuse this behavior.
Honestly this hiring manager casts a negative light on the entire organization. Do they treat everyone this poorly? Business partners, employees?
I mean, potentially they failed the real test by asking all the questions - Kagi specifically say they're looking for people who can deal with an open-ended project, and instead of just deciding to do something cool, they seem to spend a lot of time demonstrating that they can't deal with open-endedness by asking a lot of questions and coming up with a detailed spec and asking for approval before starting.
That's not to say what Kagi is doing is good, but it's probably for the best for the candidate that they didn't get the job because it sounds like they wouldn't flourish in that kind of environment (which is better to know before starting a job, instead of starting a job you're going to hate and then burning out or failing probation)
* Don't ask clarifying questions: Get failed for making assumptions and not identifying business requirements before implementation
They were failed because they could not deal with the answer, they were not failed for act of asking the question itself.
Actually happens sometimes in my work... Q: "Are there any requirements on the database used?" A: "Nope, just make sure the final system will be able to handle the required load"
If this applies to you, this is probably the best advice anyone can give to you. I was granted an in-person interview with Microsoft as a freshman back in the early 2000s on account of my stellar GPA. They were the company to work at back then. Unfortunately, I didn't solve the brain teaser. Disheartened, I refused to try again even when they invited me to try again the next few years, and I went with an old dinosaur company instead.
I realized my mistake shortly after starting to work at the dinosaur, and clawed my way tooth and nail into a job at Microsoft. It took me 2 years, but it was the single best thing I have done for my career, and changed the course of my life for the better.
Somehow the only criticism I got is that it was not simple enough.
Perhaps the moral of the story is that many managers have no idea what the word "simple" implies in terms of software.
This is a classic situation:
Engineer gets asked to implement the "do what I mean" button by some manager, this is a magic button that when pressed will do whatever the manager wants at that moment. The manager acts shocked when they are told that this is not a simple request to fulfill. The manager thinks: "I am being tricked! I merely asked for a single button!"
That is often a problem with proposals/design docs in general. In the real job, if proposal is actually required, it would be sent it back with "please add details on UX and how you are going to store email headers". In this case, the proposal was explicitly _not_ required though, so interviewers did not want to ask for more details on the optional document. They checked what was written there, found no problems, and approved it.
No wonder he focused on backend part.
So from the interviewer's standpoint, author was asking about few details of implementation, like "can I use third-party service for email storage?"; and the response was of course "yes, you can" (because assignment was pretty clear that backend does not need to be advanced or even present, and that it's UI that matters)
I guess the question worked as intended, and filtered out candidate who cannot even read the simple requirements.
(The amount of effort was disproportional though, but I am not sure how to solve this in take-home context without discriminating against people who have busy schedules and/or work slowly)
If you are asked to implement X and instead you take extra time and come back with X+Y+Z, what have you done? Wasted time e.g. money. Companies really hate wasting money.
So if in your candidate project you demonstrate a propensity for bike-shedding any task, that's gonna be a big red flag.
In the real world, if the time he spent was deemed wasted time, that's management's fault.
Concrete and working? Technically, yes. This would have been an excellent submission for a different assignment and role. But it doesn't seem to suit the specifications for this one.
Then I waited for two weeks, and all I got was a clearly templated response.
The worst part isn’t even the rejection — it’s the vague replies, or no reply at all.It just makes you feel like your time doesn’t matter.
Thank you for writing this. We really do need more people to speak up about these things.
If you're asked to do a take home, I highly recommend confirming that there will be a follow up regardless of the assessment, and if they do not agree to this, do not do the "home work". The honest truth is that most of the teams hiring are of pretty low quality and therefore implementing a good solution is a negative because the team hiring is not at your level (which is a frustrating reason for being rejected).
I'm an early adopter of Kagi and am now planning on cancelling my account over of this. Completely unacceptable. If you don't have time to chat with a candidate about their work, don't ask them to do the work in the first place.
Their solution seems to be nothing like "a minimal, terminal-inspired email client", and OP completely ignored the references to tools they were told to "take inspiration from"
When there is such bad misunderstanding of the requirements, I'd not waste time on the discussion either.
Would any of their emails give a hiring manager idea that the candidate failed to understand the assignment in such a gross way?
Email 1, "What kind of extra feature do you value highly"
Interviewer thinks: "UX improvement could be VI-like megacommands, "pretty UI" must mean creative use of colors and font attributes, privacy-related must be encryption at rest... It's all good, we are happy to look at all of those!"
Email 2, "A webapp with golang accessible online, deployed through AWS using ECS Fargate, with SSL (https), integrated with an email sender provider, with authentication through a login screen, with the ability to send emails through a form, and displaying incoming emails in the user interface."
Interviewer thinks: "OK, that's a lot of implementation details.. Not sure why candidate feels the need to confirm that, but nothing in the list above will be graded as a negative. The important things we care about are that it's inspired by terminal apps like mutt, and that "it should feel fast and intuitive" and one can totally do that using technologies above"
Without seeing the screenshots/mockups, how would one even guess that the candidate was so off?
Really? My email states explicitly why I want to confirm that:
> I would like to know what kind of response I could expect from Kagi if I drive it to completion.
Are you forgetting that the entire transaction implies a lot of work for the candidate?
Are you forgetting that candidate is doing this to land a job?
Do you think the candidate is writing a design document just for fun?
Your subtext implies that I should have guessed the grading, which is quite mind-blowing.
Remember, the instructions mention a web app as an option, the role is for a web-based company, and if my design document did not meet any of the key aspects they could have brought it up and rejected my proposal.
The assignment had exactly 1 line about actual back-endy stuff: "Can use a fake backend (DB, in-memory, etc) or real ..."
Now, what did your email asked for? There was a whole bunch of things about back-endy stuff, and exactly 1 (one) sentence about the user-visible things, the thing they cared about the most:
"The UI will be kept simple, showing pagination for sent and received emails. In addition to the requirements of the assessment, there will be a login screen and two accounts"
So maybe you intended this to be a complete design document, but it actually was not. This is because it did not actually did contain any parts the interviewer cared about. And that's one of the reasons why you got no feedback - you could do _anything_ for the backend and they would likely still accepted that, they simply did not care if you used Pulumi or terraform or "start.sh" or "docker compose up"
And no, you don't need to guess the grading, you just need to read the assignment carefully. What do they seem to want? What kinds of things do they mention a lot? What kind of things do they mention in passing?
> That is part of the assessment itself, see what kind of extra features you can come up if any
It seems like the author wanted to hear something more like "ok, here’s a list of things we want you to implement, and here’s mock-ups for the UI, and here’s the API spec you can follow". How I’m reading the HM’s response is - I should spend a few minutes trying out the email clients they mentioned or watching videos on them, and come up with a list of their features. Apply my own judgement to say which ones are most important and roughly estimate the time it will take to implement a PoC for the assignment. At this point you could take that to the HM and say "hey, I think I can do X, Y, Z features within the timeframe. I’d like to have W, U, V, features in the client but I think they’re less important and I won’t have time. Since this is a backend position I will focus on the API and the client will be a thin wrapper around that. Does that sound good?". They will probably say yes and maybe throw in a "when you do X feature think about users that have 100k unread emails in their inbox", and you’ll get a gold star for "dealing with ambiguity". If I was the HM I would expect some amount of back and forth like this. Since the guidelines are so broad you can focus in on the areas you are most familiar with and keep the rest super simple. As far as we know the author sent the one email on March 18 including a lot of details about what dependencies they were going to use but no product or clarifying questions after that, which the HM might have happily answered. They also both went past the deadline set by the company AND their own self-imposed later deadline from their own proposal.
At the end of the day this is a startup and so it makes sense that what they’re looking for is someone who can work independently. They won’t have a PM to come up with the spec and list of requirements for you every time, and an architect who hands you the perfect software design, and they need you to be able to apply your own judgement and look ahead so that if you are designing their backend and 6 months down the line users ask for drafts support, you don’t come back with "sorry I didn’t account for drafts in my data model because no one told me, we can’t support that without redoing the whole thing".
It sounds like this actually worked fine as a filter for both the author and the company, just that the author realized too late in the process that this was not the work environment they were looking for. A phone screen or whatever else would've just been additional time spent for both the company and the author. I also don't think it's the company's fault that the author put in a "full work week" of hours, as far as we can tell that was never the expectation.
That’s actually a very valid point. Take-home assignments not only require a significant amount of effort from the person administering them but also from the interviewer (or rather, the hiring team). After investing the time and effort in reviewing a project, it’s reasonable to expect feedback/a response back if requested.
However, we must also acknowledge certain realities. If there are 20 solid candidates for a single open position, many capable individuals will be rejected. This doesn’t imply that they were inadequate or even “failed.” It’s simply a reality of life.
Now to be asked to justify why a hiring manager picked A and not B, legally speaking, cannot be that I had to pick one out of the amazing candidates, so I picked one. The legally correct response (unfortunately) is to get nit picky and find faults where none really exists. At least, that has been my observation in how corporate America likes to operate. And last time I checked, Kagi is based out of Palo Alto.
I would never ask 20 people to do a take-home assignment. There are so many better ways to test team fit before asking someone to commit serious, unpaid, time to a project. Historically speaking a 30 minute chat with someone provides a surprisingly good amount of information to anyone experienced in hiring.
But if you want to commit 20 people to take-home assignments, then block off 20 hours next week for 1-on-1s to chat with them about those assignments. If that sounds like too much, then don't find a better way to filter down the number of people doing homework until it feels manageable.
Why not? Does this phrasing implies any form of illegal discrimination?
And yet, the role is still advertised 1.5 months after my rejection, which means they are still getting emails from new candidates applying for the role. Do you suppose they get so many competent candidates that they can't make a decision on whom to hire?
At this point we can only speculate about their intentions, because the intentions are definitely not transparent.
But the absurdity of take home work like this is the company feels obliged to keep their requirements secret. Thus, by doing the task not knowing if it will be up to spec, you compromise on your most important skill!
Later on I read the requirements... This person applied to a position named "Email Backend Engineer" but they actually used a third-party product (postmark + turso) for email backend! They also clearly don't think about email too much - the basic stuff, like plaintext email formatting, viewing, and folders (at least inbox + outbox) are simply missing; while there are optional features, like login screen, admin page and backend framework. And backend database does not even containing a email headers map!
That person might be a great engineer, but I don't think they would be a good fit for that specific position. I'd reject them as well.
(A separate question is that hiring manager's second response... We don't do take-home interviews, but I imagine I'd be stumped by a proposal like that, it seems so irregular in a take-home assignment. Still, I can see how the candidate took that response for an approval... perhaps a next candidate would get an extra sentence perhaps something like "actual problem grading would depend on the code quality, number of features implemented, and how close those are to requirements and job description")
Update: read original job description and not just the except from the blog. That person surely omitted some stuff in their blog! the original title was:
"The project is to build a minimal, terminal-inspired email client"
it gave examples:
"Your implementation should take inspiration from existing terminal email tools like aerc, mutt, or even something like himalaya."
wow! that's 100% no hire, serious inability to read the requirements.
Which requirements were not met?
- Email client can either be in the terminal (i.e. a TUI) or a web app
- Should have basic email viewing + sending functionality
Seems like both were more than met to me.
Inspiration from existing tools is subjective. I would have assumed that spending time on the UI for a backend position was not the best way to show off my skills in a take home test.
I agree that "inspiration" can be subjective, but in this particular case the solution was so much off that it'd be hard to argue otherwise. There is nothing terminal-like in it, and the tool is not usable as an email client either. Instead of doing login screens and user management, author should have made a page to view individual email or added folder (just 3, inbox/sent/trash, would already be a great improvement)
And if you want to ignore the requirements and work off position description... the position is titled "Email Backend Engineer", and the candidate's solution offloads actual email operations (storage, transfer) to third-party services. I suspect that even if candidate provided the same UX, but would have backed it with SMTP, IMAP, TCP/IP (not via http library), DNS MX lookup, resilient storage etc... then they might have passed.
But author failed to do either serious front-end work (required by question) or serious back-end work (required by job posting), so result was entirely predictable.
Plenty of comments here have strong, but conflicting, opinions about which set of features are obviously in or out of scope. That alone indicates to me that this is a badly worded take home test.
Even ignoring that, the author told Kagi exactly what they were going to do in advance.
Applicant: I'm going to spend a week building X
Kagi: Sounds great!
Applicant: After a week, I have built X
Kagi: Not at all what we are looking for. Rejected.
I don't see any way to interpret this interaction positively.
Both can be true (they arguably did too much extraneous stuff, but didn't do what they were actually asked for).
Mind you, this is a pretty ridiculous take-home question, and I'm sure they lose plenty of good candidates to "life is too short" at this point.
If only 10 candidates applied, take home could be a 5 min task. If 50 apply, you need something that will leave only those that are really commited to working at Kagi and ready to go an extra mile (and we may be looking for resourcefulness and determination as desireable traits, given how ambitious and difficult Kagi's core mission is).
anyway, the exchange went like this:
Kagi: "please build terminal-inspired email client, you can choose which email flows you'd like to implement."
Applicant: I am going to spend a week building it, using golang, AWS, TMPL etc... I am also going to fit it onto 2 html pages.
Kagi: Sounds great!
Applicant: After a week, I have built something using golang, AWS, TMPL etc.. It has nothing to do with terminal, and does implement any of the email flows completely.
Kagi: Not at all what we are looking for. Rejected.
I don't see any way to blame Kagi for that exchange. Who would have thought the candidate decided to ignore half of the requirements?
[0] https://archive.md/A95Ju#selection-549.5-549.63
I get it that it's not always realistic to do, especially if the hiring manage reviews hundreds of applications for a hot role. But that's why take home assignment sucks. Some candidates may waste hours of their lives for nothing. Both sides need to be respectful of other people's time.
Moreover, this exercise tells you so little about the candidate and their experience. Sure, you know they can code (or did they just use Cursor?) but you have no idea whether they are good and addressing prompts and not at making wise choices. Who cares if the program can send email? What matters is that the client doesn't choke after 10k messages are received or that unicode is handled well: that's the sort of actual challenges you'd be doing at a company like Kagi, not making enormous toy projects.
Edit: Despite that, it seems like a bold choice for the author to build a web app instead of a TUI like the instructions lay out. One could say "terminal inspired" could include web applications but I think that's a stretch.
> Your implementation should take inspiration from existing terminal email tools like aerc, mutt, or even something like himalaya.
Of course the OP in this post did nothing even close to that.
Your assumption is that a better font-choice and some CSS would have made the difference for a back-end role.
While we are talking, I was actually always wondered about candidate responses like that...
There is that spec, which starts with "minimal, terminal-inspired email client", and contains specific references to the products you want to imitate. Line 3 even explicitly says "Can use a fake backend", and to me, this shows pretty clearly that they don't care about backend, they need UI.
And then there is your submissions which basically has no UI to speak of. It's not even "minimal", as the basic features (like new mail indicator) are missing. Also, in no possible world you can call this "terminal inspired", it's 100% generic web app.
How on earth did you expect this submission to work, given the assignment they sent you?
Did you just skip over the original page and then forgot about it immediately?
Or did you read it, decided that "terminal-inspired web pages cannot possibly exist" and proceeded to implement completely different thing? In that case, why didn't you mention this in email ("and btw, I am going to ignore the part where you said I should build terminal-inspired email client because I think it's stupid.")
Or maybe you read the requirements, and randomly declared half of them "useless fluff" and decided not to implement them?
What was your thought process?
Edit: I've actually checked the full requirements page, and they explicitly say this in "Inspiration":
> Your implementation should take inspiration from existing terminal email tools like aerc, mutt, or even something like himalaya.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yY1sVXMkP_o
Also, the prompt for a terminal client really changes what they're testing! Email web UIs have been a known quantity for years. But the UX of a terminal client is still something that's not "solved." I suspect the rubric for the question has large sections about how they decide to make a terminal client that OP's submission doesn't address at all
This is the real take away. Don't put in outsized effort at companies that are highly subscribed. Everyone prides themselves on being "extremely competitive" and unless it's a FAANG (or well known quiet money fountain like Valve), it's probably not actually worth the effort.
If it's hot on HN, it's highly subscribed -- you just can't expect effort to be valued the same way when there are 10 applicants.
> We normally don’t provide feedback at this stage. We have had other submissions that were simpler and stronger, so we decided to continue forward with these candidates.
This would have been a great place to push and ask for a little more feedback (while being nice as possible since they have nearly no incentive to share more)... How could the other solutions have been simpler and "stronger" (whatever that means? more robust?) -- a few details on what you missed that they were looking for (tests? documentation? CI?) could at least add some value.
All that said -- finding a job is really hard right now. Wish you the best.
This was part of the assignment:
> This project tests your ability not only to code, but to deal with ambiguity and open-endedness, which is essential in R&D projects like Kagi Labs.
It was vague on purpose, they wanted to see how your decision making process goes with what you fill in the blanks with, without needing hand holding. You seemed to ignore this critical piece and went further and further against it with each message.
I cringed hard at the “proposal” he sent them (whyyy) + confusing the hiring manager as some sort of counselor + “will I get the job if I build this?”
Huge misread on OP’s part long before he wrote a line of code.
1 - Too much chatter. Part of the assignment is using judgment and working in ambiguity. I probably would have ran with what was given enough to knock out something small and local in an evening or two. Asking questions is usually fine, they even welcomed it, but seems counter to the original ask.
2 - Writing and sharing a proposal seemed like way overkill. You have to remember that these companies are now getting hundreds if not thousands if not tens of thousands of applicants, that is a lot to deal with if everyone does so. I think it's a bit of a disconnect...you feel like you're going above and beyond and being thorough, they feel like it's being a bit long winded and wasting time. That probably explains the nonresponse.
3 - The finished product seemed functional, but seemed a bit overkill on the infra and polish. This is probably a good thing to work with you, but ended up wasting a lot of your time if not being selected, which was the case.
4 - Maybe I missed something, but the requirement asked for terminal inspired. I'm not quite sure precisely what they meant by that, but didn't see any possible interpretation of that in the result.
Anyways, hope you don't take it too negatively or personally - you obviously are a talented individual and moreso seem to really care about your work. Just wanted to play a little devil's advocate with a different perspective.
The youtube video provided by the OP seems more "web-app", "click driven".
For contrast:
* The OP's submission: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yY1sVXMkP_o
* Someone interacting with aerc: https://youtu.be/kpAwwgnZUxg?t=308
* Someone interacting with mutt: https://youtu.be/C35NRp42bEQ
This is the problem. Your guess is different from the author's guess, because nothing is explicitly stated.
For others who did not click the link, the explicit requirements are:
> - Email client can either be in the terminal (i.e. a TUI) or a web app
> - Should have basic email viewing + sending functionality
> - Can use a fake backend (DB, in-memory, etc) or real IMAP/POP/JMAP/etc backend
> - Does not have to handle rich text messages, just plaintext
> Your implementation should take inspiration from existing terminal email tools like aerc, mutt, or even something like himalaya. It should feel fast and intuitive, and you can choose which email flows you'd like to implement.
The word "keyboard" does not appear. Inspiration from X, Y, and Z is entirely subjective, and you should not be punished for not reading the interviewer's mind.
My takeaway from that is that if you don't make an app that is (quote) "in the terminal (i.e. a TUI)" but choose to make a web app, then it should look at act like a TUI.
1. Spin up an EC2.
2. Install Himalaya.
3. Do some configuration.
Code quality and a sound engineering approach are there.
Personal touches aren’t. Though they look for them, absent domain knowledge they probably don’t want to see them.
Himalaya has documentation and a Github already.
No need to invent the wheel.
Won’t take an unreasonable amount of time.
And looks like a first iteration of a tool.
> Part of the assignment is using judgment and working in ambiguity.
If trying to clarify requirements is not what they wanted here, they may as well ask candidates to pick a number between 1 and 10 and reject anyone who guesses wrong.
> overkill on the infra and polish
I know its an opinion, but hard disagree on both. Take home tests are intended to show off your ability. Without specific guidance, how can anyone guess how much showing off is expected?
Polish is only bad if it stops you from delivering. Rejecting something that was delivered for being "too polished" feels like you are saying someone did too good of a job.
---
In my opinion tests with vague requirements like this are more likely to be a different way of rejecting people who are not a "culture fit".
In this case the alternative was applying to better companies, so I guess in a way the author really did fail the test.
So yes, this is a culture fit test as much (if not more) as a design and coding test. Some people who are great at design and coding would fail it, and it's how this filter is intended to work.
The hiring manager above thought it was too polished, but you think it is not polished enough.
> There’s no drafts. No CC or BCC field. No folders or labels (including sent or trash!). No replies. No threads. No shortcuts. There’s not even an indication of whether an email has been read or not. In terms of features it is very very very barebones
None of these were asked for. Your guess as to what the true requirements are completely different from the authors, and others in this comment section.
Everyone seems to have different opinions on why the author failed. No one should have their time wasted on a take home test destined to be rejected because they guessed wrong.
And in this case, the author explicitly asked if they were on the right track before spending time on the test. Kagi had the opportunity to reject early or nudge the author back in the expected direction. Instead they wasted everyone's time.
I don't see how this can be interpreted in a positive way.
"Create a terminal inspired email client so we can do an alpha test with some customers" is a reasonable ask for an engineer at an early stage startup. Of course, there would be a bit more specification, but a lot of the details would still be up to the engineer. This applicant wants more certainty than they can get.
This is illustrated by the line: "I would like to know what kind of response I could expect from Kagi if I drive it to completion." This is not a great request to make. There's no way they can answer that question, because there is no certainty available. They're probably getting a few hundred or a few thousand more submissions to evaluate.
There's no good answer and asking a question like that shows real narcissism imo.
There is usually a separate interview stage with some sort of manager, and those usually have no coding.
I'm sympathetic to how awkward it can feel to provide honest feedback to a candidate, but look: we're all people here. I think we forget that sometimes when we're assembling hiring processes. As a candidate, you need some kind of feedback mechanism that allows you to improve even if you're not a good fit for a particular organization. And if you're involved in the hiring process in any way, you ought to be equipped to handle that.
This topic has been discussed ad nauseam on HN. In most companies, there is specific company policy that prohibits providing feedback to candidates. There is literally no upside for these companies to provide feedback to candidates that they reject (except Fake/Feel-Good Internet Points, only redeemable on HN forums). Really: There is no way around it, no matter how many tears are spilled about it on HN.
This is the long and short of it.
In the US at least, discrimination laws are expansive. You can -very- easily end up saying something that violates this and putting your company at risk, no matter how good hearted you were attempting to be.
This has always felt like an excuse used by people who who just don't want to be caught in their own lies when asked to come up with a real, non-discriminatory reason.
I bet you this comes back to insurance, as many things do in the corporate world. Sufficiently large companies probably have insurance coverage for discrimination lawsuits, or at least employment disputes in general. The coverage probably costs less if you have a "no feedback" policy.
Say you say it was for failure to meet a specific performance standard (because that is the documented reason); then the ex-employee has a starting point for an discrimination claim by looking for evidence that trnds to support the claim that people who differ on some protected-from-discrimination axis who failed to meet that standard were not fired. No reason given, no starting point. In theory, this policy helps make false nuisance claims more work and less likely, but a substantive reason for it is that HR knows that they cannot eliminate all prohibited acts by managers that would create liability, so making it harder to get a starting point for gathering evidence is important to prevent valid claims from materializing. HR policy does not exist to protect employees from unlawful treatment, it exists to protect the company from liability for such treatment. Sometimes thise two interests align, but when it comes to information about firing decisions they do not.
There’s similar things that can be done with other prohibited reasons for dismissal, loke retaliation; but the idea is any information you give makes it easier for them to make a case against you.
This is also, in reverse, why, as a departing employee (whether departing voluntarily or not), you should never participate in an exit interview or, if you must as a condition of some severance or other pay or benefit, never volunteer any information beyond the bare minimum necessary; one significant purpose of such interviews is to document information useful either for potential claims against you or to defend against any potential claims you might have, including those you have not yet discovered, against the company.
As one pointed out, there's a "well you said it was X, but person Y who got hired did that too. And they're a different race or gender or religion, so that leads me to believe discrimination."
There's also you trying to be helpful, saying something along the line of "well you hesitated a bit and sounded unsure in your answers", only to find out they have some disability that caused that and now have admitted you're discriminating based on it.
Maybe you'll say "well, if I had known, I wouldn't have noticed it or cared." And a lot of candidates would likely say as much up front. But they don't have to tell you about it at all. See how that creates a weird dynamic?
Is it common? Probably not. But it obviously happened or else such rules wouldn't exist. It's one of those things that the bad actors ruin it for everybody. Bigots are never going to admit their reasons - good people will. But bad people will always try to take advantage, regardless.
There is widespread resentment of this and many other common hiring practices in the tech sector, and that is further impacting both the quality of candidates as well as employee motivation and satisfaction. The upside for companies is higher quality candidates whose first experience with the company is a hiring process that makes the candidate want to work there.
Companies have been optimizing for candidates that are an immediate ideal cultural and technological fit. They are all competing for candidates that are the idealized developer, with perfect social skills, a brilliant CV, and deep technical experience that is an exact match for whatever the company is doing at the moment.
That's fine and rational and all, but a necessary consequence of this is that that pool is quite small and there are lots of companies competing for those people. Meanwhile, there are a lot of very good candidates who are underemployed because they aren't getting the opportunity or resources needed to become those idealized employees. This is a game theory outcome where both parties are optimizing themselves into a losing position.
I've been employed in this industry, off and on, for a long time. I assure you that companies didn't always behave this way. There has been a clear, obvious, and severe decline in the hiring experience, and these policies are hurting the entire industry.
It's generally socially frowned-upon to go on a couple of dates with someone and then ghost them. It happens, but it's not considered good practice. We recognize that it's cruel but also leads to a more cynical, detached, overall worse dating experience for everyone. Saying "I don't think this will work out, you seem nice but you're not what I'm looking for right now" is difficult and awkward, but it's also a necessary skill that needs to be maintained. Sometimes people don't react well, but that doesn't make it less necessary: it closes a feedback loop that ultimately allows earnest people who are looking for relationships to learn and grow and become better candidates for the next relationship.
Do you not code review? Are you a rubber stamp "LGTM" shop that should just be pushing to main but cargo culted the ceremony because github has it built in?
Yes, that sounds like extremely valuable feedback.
Why do you suppose asking a question like that shows narcissism? To me it shows a willingness to infest feedback to improve.
I will add the caveat that if someone asked me that in an interview I would likely give a non-answer because I’m not totally sure what all I’m even allowed to say.
Because I see what happens to my wife when she interviews, and goddamn its brutal.
I broke it down for them. "This was nothing to do with you, and we would have had no objection to hiring you. However, the candidate who beat you out simply had more domain experience in XYZ area" and went on to say "For what it's worth, we had 500+ applications, of which we in-depth reviewed 100 resumes, had 40 first-round interviews, 15 second-round, and three final round."
They emailed me back to express appreciation and that though this didn't work out, it renewed their confidence to know they didn't "mess something up".
Since then, if we're at that point in a process and I'm rejecting you, I'll at least give you something to work with.
People, being humans and prone to pattern seeking, assume that if they didn't get the job, it's something specific they did, or failed to do.
And sometimes, that's true. But for a lot of candidates, it just came down to another candidate being slightly better, or slightly cheaper, or some combination of value markers.
A lot of my interview feedback comes down to "I don't see any reason you wouldn't be a good fit, but we have other interviews and it's going to come down to value."
Some people will take this as me saying "Don't ask for what you're worth," or "we're gonna low-ball your salary." The reality is, we're a business, and if I can produce the same widget with person X or person Y and person X costs 10K less a year, I'm going with person X. Every time.
It's okay to avoid giving feedback if you don't want to. I can think of a few ways to answer that question in a neutral or positive fashion to defuse the situation and legally protect the company.
I do get what you’re saying, but I disagree, there is a good answer; and as is often the case, it’s an honest one.
I interview pretty well, but if I go into an interview with a company that wants hungry hustlers and I've spent the whole interview talking about kindness and team spirit, or if you think I don't know enough pl/pgsql to deal with your gnarly legacy backend, or I'm getting the vibe that none of the engineers seem to like working here, then we need to speak honestly about that.
If they wanted to hire me enough to interview me, but at the end of a half-day of interviewing I'm going to walk away without a job, then they need to rewrite their position description so I know not to apply, deal with their morale problem, or directly ask me how much PL/pgSQL I've done. We both stand to benefit from talking about how the interview went.
Like suppose they do hate their job. Do you expect them to speak that plainly and honestly to every candidate who asks "So how do you like working here?" and risk getting that posted to the front page of HN?
You're asking them to risk their own livelihood so you get a better signal for your own job search, that doesn't seem like a proportional trade to me.
Obviously I'm not advocating for complete opaqueness, but your interviewer is hardly ever in a good position to part with their true feelings towards questions like "How did I do compared to other candidates? How is it truly working here?"
I've basically almost always given direct and obvious non-answer to the first question: "I cannot tell you right now, because I'll need to write down and collate my thoughts. And I'm not allowed to share feedback directly, so your recruiter will be in touch with the feedback afterwards."
Precisely the opposite. Asking for criticism and genuinely being interested in what others think of you with the goal of taking the feedback on board and improving is the polar opposite of typical narcissistic behavior. As far as I'm aware that sort of self-reflection is inherently incompatible with NPD.
If my interviewer stumbled over this it would be a red flag.
Nobody is getting a few hundred or few thousand submissions to evaluate. Nobody. If you are getting 1k applicants, at best 50 are asked to do a take-home and even then, not all at once.
If by some miracle 100 people did this to completion at the same time, there should be a notice to the effect that due to high volume, blah blah blah.
The author may have had issues (I personally don’t count “need clear instructions” as an issue - edit - I see they didn’t adhere to the TUI prompt), but the hiring manager definitely did.
It's meant for the person for whom it's ideally an afterthought. Tough reality.
I agree that the hiring manager could have handled it much better, but as a rule: If at any point during any hiring process you feel like you need to spend even close to a full time week of work on anything without being very explicitly told so, you are wrong.
I love that the industry has become so poor at gathering requirements that devs are now effectively filtered for their ability to mind read.
> And don't hesitate to tell us if you have any questions!
I personally have no problem dealing with "ambiguity and open-endedness" (and, in fact, enjoy it!), but my solution to this problem at every job that has had this issue is: talk to people and understand the problem.
Attempting to "mind-read" is the worst solution to ambiguity, and, in practice, nearly always leads to disaster.
When the client can play with that, the scope can be expanded and additional features can be described.
What they want is someone they can work with. Take home tests are about cultural fit too.
* Can be completed in 30 minutes by a skilled programmer
* Has clear evaluation criteria, both objective and subjective
* Has multiple approaches that require making different tradeoffs
And of course, only give it to some candidates where the result will be make-or-break.
As someone who took one of these broad take-home assignments my last time looking for a job, I failed a the assignment for a job I was overqualified for because I was told I wasn't able to divine what parts of the extremely broad assignment I would be graded on.
I doubt I will be in a position where I get a job that isn't a referral for the rest of my career, but it really turned me off of these kinds of assignments, both taking and giving them.
While writing my questions (and testing in my teammates), I found that "can be completed in 30 minutes by a skilled programmer" very often means "can be completed almost automatically by AI", and that AI will give explanations too, that interviewer could repeat during code review phase.
It's kind of up to what you're filtering for, and how much you trust the candidate at that part of the process, and how you follow up after hiring.
But we want the person to use AI, so what is a 30 minutes session?
Work environments that "code first, review later" have been some of the most toxic in my career. It really sucks when you spend days building a feature only to find its not wanted. Which is why explaining the feature in English and getting approvals is the industry standard for shipping projects.
This candidate followed modern software practices that healthy workplaces follow.
(I'm also a hiring manager at a 1k+ engineer company).
But from my experience, the two types look at each other like the other is insane. If you write up an ERD at a scrappy 6 person startup, everyone is going to think you waste time.
Conversely, if you join a larger team with established processes and begin flinging code at the wall unabated, people are going to think you're reckless and possibly inexperienced.
I've worked in places with very strong product management, where every single detail must be approved by a PM. I've also worked in places where engineer has a lot of autonomy - "John from FOO dept is spending too much time wrangling the daily data updates. Can you help him, here is his email? Our higher-ups allocated two weeks for that, but we can extend this if needed." - and from then on, you are in full control of the design and implementation, subject to your team's rules (because no one wants a system with bus factor of 1).
For me, I've found that the latter places are much nicer to work in. The interview question seem to focus on latter situation too.
If the next guy puts in 10 hours, and you only put in 1 hour, assuming equal skill. Which project will be more polished?
If you are high skill and only work 1 hour on the project, but a newbie puts in 10 hours with ChatGPT's help, I'd be the newbie would have a pretty competitive project to the skilled 1 hour candidate.
The person that got the offer coded 1-2 more extra features than I could in that time. What am I supposed to tell the interviewer?
"You're not supposed to get a polished project?"
If you're the interviewer, are you going to hire the guy that did just was asked or you are going to hire the guy that worked nights and weekends to get the perfect project delivered to you beyond what was asked?
I've worked with IMAP and POP libraries before so am familiar with the fundamentals for building a client and libraries in many languages make this part of the integration very straightforward. Couple that with a "modern" CLI library this should come together very quickly. And I would not have included half a dozen cloud services for a terminal like email client. The project submitted completely missed the mark and they still have no idea why.
If I wanted to create something by meticulously planning out every detail and spoon feeding them to a code monkey with no creative input I'd just use an LLM or outsource to India where you've got to spell out every little detail and still get questionable results back. I've had to do that plenty of times and I don't want to work like that. I want to work with other professionals who can run with a concept and deliver good results without constant oversight and micromanagement. That's clearly not the author of the blog post.
The issue isn't his solution is incorrect. The issue is the company's said his solution was correct and then they rejected him anyways.
This is the equivalent of the interviewer telling you the brute force solution on a leetcode is good enough, but then rejecting you after the interview.
The company said that _the parts he wrote in the doc_ would not negatively affect his scoring. But his doc did not contain many parts that the company cared about - read it yourself, and try to answer the questions like: Will there be a per-email indicator? Is there a "sent mail" folder? How will user be notified of incoming email?
More on this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43996105
Exactly. The position they are hiring for is not that of a coder; coding is just one of the skills the position requires, maybe not even the most important.
When I worked at unprofitable, small startups, a lot of mental energy was lost due to miscommunications before the MR review process. Eg an engineer would be tasked to complete a project, but misunderstood a critical component and only after n-days of work was this identified and corrected.
Only ever heard it referred to as FAANG before
Process is healthy at large companies, because they move slowly and communicating your changes often becomes far more important than the actual code that needs to be written. Kagi is a small company. It does not make sense to cargo-cult practices from a company a hundred times larger.
lol, this makes me very old school but I suffered jobs where that was the outcome of months if not years of my work!
>Delivery date: Sunday EOD March 30,
>This is two business days later than the two-week mark since you sent me your first email.
With no accompanying personal reason for the delay, it's already a rejection in my books. The objective was to design an appropriate solution within the deadline.