Ask HN: How many hours of interview “homework” is appropriate?
I just had a first interview with a company. They have given me a coding assignment and bug bash assignment that would take a rockstar coder a minimum of 4 hours and for someone like me would take about 6-8 hours. Is that absurd? Should I be offended?
3 comments
It's up to you. That doesn't feel absolutely absurd to me. If you work with them, you're going to spend much more than 8 hours working... 8 hours is very small to judge people, but it will give them an idea of how clean and careful you can be.
Companies like Automattic would start with a 4-8 hours assignment, then if you do well, they would ask you to work part-time for them for 2 weeks.
Some companies won't ask you anything except to code for one hour over the phone...
I was a strong proponent of the "write some code for us" interview approach for years. We used a variation, slightly unusual - we would pay interviewees for some hours of work so they did not feel we were trying to get them to work for free as an interview.
But looking back at the results over a period of years, some hires never reached the level of quality/productivity they had shown in the interview homework. I don't know why this is, one possibility is that some interviewees "cheat" by getting someone else to do the project for them. I don't know if that happened to us, but whatever did happen, the net result is that the interview homework approach is not ultimately all that great.
Now we do something different. As part of the interview process, the interviewee sets and codes with a couple of our developers for a couple of hours. This has its own downsides (some otherwise excellent people have trouble with the stress of being "in the hot seat"), but so far we're much happier with it.
Also, spend a few hours trying to write code with someone, and you have a pretty good sense of the oh-so-desired "cultural fit" without having to ever actually look for such a vague thing.
But looking back at the results over a period of years, some hires never reached the level of quality/productivity they had shown in the interview homework. I don't know why this is, one possibility is that some interviewees "cheat" by getting someone else to do the project for them. I don't know if that happened to us, but whatever did happen, the net result is that the interview homework approach is not ultimately all that great.
Now we do something different. As part of the interview process, the interviewee sets and codes with a couple of our developers for a couple of hours. This has its own downsides (some otherwise excellent people have trouble with the stress of being "in the hot seat"), but so far we're much happier with it.
Also, spend a few hours trying to write code with someone, and you have a pretty good sense of the oh-so-desired "cultural fit" without having to ever actually look for such a vague thing.
It's not absurd, you shouldn't be offended, and only you can decide if you want to invest 8 hours proving your fitness to this company.