Why take-home interview assignments are a waste of time

spy · Jun 7, 2023

TheDawn said:
When you are slaving 9-5 for a job, when you get home from a long commute, you are totally exhausted. All you want to do is just to eat and then veg out in front of the TV or computer and then go to bed so you can start all over again the next morning.
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If this is the situation you find yourself in then you definitely took the wrong job IMHO.

M.W. · Jun 7, 2023

Only applying where there are less than 100 competitors? Good luck, that must be some shit show that you will be ending up at. Virtually every job that pays 6 figures has more than 100 applicants. Not sure on which planet you are living on. Ask your dad or uncle whether they can get you under their wings perhaps...

Aquarians said:
Interviews are a probability game. My target is to maximize probability of getting hired, which means I follow a few rules:

1) No more than a few 10s of candidates on the job. Assuming all candidates are equal (including me), my probability of getting hired is 1 / N where N is the number of candidates. A rule of thumb is that 2 out of 3 candidates are delusional so from 30 candidates you're still left with 10 strong competitors. Only in exceptional cases I would apply to a job that lists 100+ candidates already applying.

2) Never agree to spend my time during the interview process where the interviewer doesn't spend the exact same time as me. There are two offenders to this rule:

Automated LeetCode / Codility tests. These are the worst. Whole thing is fully automated so they don't even have to spend 5 minutes afterwards to evaluate your work. They just send you a link and expect you to spend one hour on it, at zero cost (in time) for them.

Homework assignments that take more than 1 hour (usually they expect 8 hours+). It takes them some 5 minutes tops on their side to "evaluate" your investment of 8-16 hours.

Reason I refuse these tests is that there's no "friction", or cost to interviewer. If they put the same amount of time as me, there's a strong incentive on their part to keep it short / efficient. Don't do 5 hours of interviews on 100 candidates, because they just don't have so much time to waste from their personnel. So gotta triage the list from 100 to 10-20, reduce time to 1-2 hours, etc. It incentivizes them.

But the situation where they rob you of your time at no cost or very little cost for them is just that: robbery. Plus it's NEVER the really good companies, I dunno like Google or Facebook, where at least you'd be paid decently if you pass. So they can go fuck themselves.

3) No more than 10 interviews without getting the job. If I do 10 interviews and get rejected every time, there's something wrong with my evaluation of the jobs I apply versus competence I bring. So make a pause, study, re-evaluate and after several months start applying again. This of course assumes I already have a job in order to afford this, so far in 20 years it's always been the case.
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Aquarians · Jun 7, 2023

M.W. said:
Only applying where there are less than 100 competitors? Good luck, that must be some shit show that you will be ending up at. Virtually every job that pays 6 figures has more than 100 applicants. Not sure on which planet you are living on. Ask your dad or uncle whether they can get you under their wings perhaps...
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Yeah, I live on planet EU, not US. Almost noone pays 6 figures and the difference between a programmer's salary and say a teacher's or a police officer's is not so huge, they're more or less in the same range. And there are A LOT of jobs,
100,000 just for "C++", it would be impossible to have an average of 100 applicants per job, there simply aren't enough devs.

2rosy · Jun 7, 2023

TheDawn said:
I see being laid off as the opportunity to do something new. When you are slaving 9-5 for a job, when you get home from a long commute, you are totally exhausted. All you want to do is just to eat and then veg out in front of the TV or computer and then go to bed so you can start all over again the next morning. You never have time to actually do things or explore new things that you wanted to do. It's only when you are laid off then you actually have the time to explore and venture out to try something new while ironically looking for jobs for you to go back to slaving for somebody else. It was during a laid-off that I first started trading and I never looked back since. Sure I go back to slaving from time to time when my trading was not working out but I never completely gave up on trading and it was the laid-off that gave me the opportunity otherwise I would've never had that chance if I was actually able to stay on that job.
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Commute? All remote in pure tech industry if your good. And with remote you have time to do other things. Even trading firms ,funds, banks are hybrid

M.W. · Jun 7, 2023

Or relocate. Go where the money is if one is good or else put up.

2rosy said:
Commute? All remote in pure tech industry if your good. And with remote you have time to do other things. Even trading firms ,funds, banks are hybrid
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vanzandt · Jun 7, 2023

Hmmm.

So I can start a bogus LLC--- The Zandyerbuilt Group---- "$79B AUM for some of the worlds most discrete clients" --- build a website on Go-Daddy for $80... buy some bird that can sport a British accent a ghetto phone to answer when you call--- and then run an ad on Indeed-EU stating the parameters I want.

"The successful candidate will demonstrate the ability to code a high probability model using a minimum of 100 data-points to beat the SPX consistently over time." Starting pay, $275K plus bonus. "You have one week to complete the assignment for consideration in joining our prestigious team."

Where's Calhoun?... We could run this scam out of his Vegas condo and sell the entries here on ET.

RantaMin · Jun 8, 2023

M.W. said:
Only applying where there are less than 100 competitors? Good luck, that must be some shit show that you will be ending up at. Virtually every job that pays 6 figures has more than 100 applicants. Not sure on which planet you are living on. Ask your dad or uncle whether they can get you under their wings perhaps...
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What should be the position or company to get paid 6 figures? In EU or US?

M.W. · Jun 8, 2023

Something where value is added worth compensating 100k+

RantaMin said:
What should be the position or company to get paid 6 figures? In EU or US?
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zdreg · Jun 9, 2023

M.W. said:
Something where value is added worth compensating 100k+
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Some people need to be reminded that birds fly and fish swim.