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0 pointsjlees12y ago0 comments

I've seen companies do a "challenge" style interview, where it's less of a contract and more of a "take this problem home, code something up to solve it, push to github and let us know when you're done". Then the interview portion is discussing the solution. It means you can calibrate across candidates better, but I think the advantage of an onsite contract job is the two-way feedback, especially in a smaller company.

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scrabble12y ago

This is the way the company I work for currently does it.

They provide the candidate with a piece of terrible code, ask for a code review of as many issues as the candidate can find, and also for a refactored copy of the code. Both of which are completed remotely on the dev's own time.

This is before even meeting the candidate in person. Once we meet in person for the first time, another terrible piece of code is provided -- in this case a basic data structure -- and another code review is requested. The candidate is given 15 minutes to complete it.

It's interesting what comes back. Some people comment only stylistic issues, others only logical or architectural issues. One person got up and left during their alone time.

Other than these, no coding is required.

So far, it's worked out pretty well. And when I was going through it, I enjoyed it.

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ataggart12y ago

In my experience, these take home projects are woefully underspecified. Do they know this and expect me to email them with "good questions"? Or want me to not email them and "fill in the blanks" on my own? Do they want something that "just works"? Or something that is "reusable"? And so on. There's a reason we don't write production code by just throwing a document over the wall.

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anonymoushn12y ago

My current company does this. It seems to work pretty well, but it has some of the same problems as other methods. In particular, the standards applied to the solution vary greatly from "Does it work and run at most 40x slower than expected?" to "It heap-allocates things that could be stack-allocated, so we should pass".

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