Very long take-home assignments, I was interviewing with a startup for a backend position. they gave me 5 days to build a Cinema Ticket Reservation API, this by itself was long since it required managing 5 to 6 tables with it corresponding crud and business logic of each one (and also tests) but apart from that they wanted to see complex data structures, design patterns, caches strategies, be able to "scale", a design diagram, and as a bonus if I wanted add a CI/CD pipeline.
I did only the core app, but none of the others stuffs beacase that looked like way to much unpaid work just to "prove" my ablities.
I should have known better becase they rejected me because the project was to simple, wasn't going to "scale", and did'n used any complex design patterns, a day an a half of work wasted.
I totally agree with this, In particular with the typical "Why do you want to work for this company?" or "Why are you leaving your current job?"
The honest and most common answer "I want more money" makes you look greedy and you had to come up with a more acceptable excuse, Like "Your product is very interesting", "I'm "Looking for new challenges".
kind of like the initial steps of dating where you kind of know what the other is up to but you don't talk about it until you had evaluated each other and decided that "yeah I want to be your girlfriend" or "yeah I want to hire you" and then you finally can take your mask off and talk with honesty.
I do but one of them does know, basically I got a job offer, but my previous(and current employer) really needed me since they have a legacy backend written in a relative niche language and I was the only one left to maintain it while they migrate it to python, so they offer me to switch from full time to part-time with the same salary. so half of the day with my old employer and the rest with the new one.
I'm only doing it to pay for my house faster and when I finish with that by the end of the year I will quit, so far It had worked pretty well(minus some super long days).
All the cover letters I have written have flown over the head of the application reviewers, they didn't even glance at it on all the interviews where a cover letter was required in the application form, the interviewer always asks the same questions that I already answered in the cover letter. funnily enough, all the companies that I had applied also didn't bother looking at my github account even to 'github account link' field in the application form is supposed to be there for some reason
No very good, I'm starting to believe that the so-called "shortage of developers" is just companies who have a terrible and frankly broken interview process, over-optimized to detect red flags no matter how small they are(I had been rejected for so many small things like "I didn't talk enough with the interviewers", "Your solution is good but you forgot this small edge case that we didn't mention ", "Your code was fine and it does solve the problem but we wanted to see you going the extra")
leetcode problems are silly but company us them as filters because they don't know any better but on the "Brightside" only take 1 o 2 hours of your life.
take-home challenges are worse because they require more hours to completed and sometimes companies just ghost or reject you without giving you any feedback.
By far the best way to skip all that nonsense has been with referrals, I believe its because if the new guy underperformed they can just blame the one who referred him
I did only the core app, but none of the others stuffs beacase that looked like way to much unpaid work just to "prove" my ablities.
I should have known better becase they rejected me because the project was to simple, wasn't going to "scale", and did'n used any complex design patterns, a day an a half of work wasted.