I see this sentiment fairly frequently, and TBH, it completely baffles me. I am in my mid 40s. Yes, I don't have nearly as much energy nor desire to spend all weekend doing take-home programming assignments as I did 20 years ago. But if one candidate is willing to do more work and preparation for an interview, that's not 'discrimination' - that's one person showing they are willing to put more effort into a job than another.

True, your family obligations may mean you don't have as much time to spend on that preparation. If that's the case, that's a fine, very reasonable trade-off you've made to prioritize your family over your work. But then it strikes me as entirely UNreasonable to accuse businesses of discrimination because they choose employees who have decided not to make that same trade-off.

>If that's the case, that's a fine, very reasonable trade-off you've made to prioritize your family over your work.

I'd advise that if you are ever involved in a hiring situation you never write that down. "I'm sorry my project wasn't done so well, [my baby, pregnancy, illness, religious service] took most of my weekend".

That is a prime example of age/gender/disability discrimination. You should never assume someone's out side of work life presumes an inability to do the job during work hours.

True, there may be some jobs that are truly 9-5, and if that's the case, so be it. But frankly, as someone who is willing to put more dedication into my work, it feels like complete discrimination against me if someone willing to do less work then demands the same level of compensation and advancement opportunities.

Yes: "Our job requires you to be on-call 24/7, one week a month, can you commit to that?".

No: "You said you didn't have time for the take home test because you have a family. The family will get in the way of 24/7 support"

Also yes: "you will be traveling 5 days a week for your sales job, can you do this?" No. "We don't hire people with families for this job."

And, there's no discrimination towards you putting more time into your work. That's quite a stretch, if all you have going for you is your ability to put in more that 60 hours a week, that's not saying much.

Who agrees to being on call 24/7 for a week? Especially when you are getting paid a typical professional salary? It seems absurd. I've always been active after hours and willing to jump in when things happen.

But this idea that you are essentially working (since you need to always be somewhere you can start working within minutes) for a week out of a month every month of your life for a salary job with no equity or long term payoff on the other end, has to be the most bizarre choice a person could make.

Maybe there is something to that I don't understand? I guess if you don't have any other interests or people in your life. But that just seems really sad.

Possibly someone who does this could help me to understand this a little better?

When I got to Netflix, only being on call one week a month was a drastic improvement. It meant that I could plan my vacations and important family events around not being on call. On the flip side, my family understood if I suddenly got up from dinner to take a call or get out my laptop. My on call schedule was shared with the family so we could all plan accordingly. Sometimes when it was my week and I had something really important, I would ask a coworker to cover that night for me, and then do the same for them in the future.

The salary for the position accounted for this inconvenience, and it wasn't a surprise. Since everyone who does SRE has this same responsibility, it's built into the compensation. Some companies actually give you extra money when you are on call (I hear Google is one of them).

Yeah, it kinda sucks from a family perspective, but it is what it is. As long as you set expectations with everyone around you, it's not that big a deal.

As it turned out at Netflix, since I was the lead, it meant that I was the secondary or tertiary on call at all times, but again, the family knew this, and also, my coworkers knew that if I didn't answer it was because I really really couldn't take the call at that time, and everyone was fine with that. It just rolled up to next person. Only the first on call was expected to answer, all the rest of us were on a "it would be great if you could" basis.

30-minute response time means I can still do things like skiing or hiking during on-call weekends, if I'm a bit creative.

As a result of doing call, my team's product runs reliably and meets its SLA requirements, allowing my company to sell the product to other serious companies and therefore for my job to exist.

I get paid around $4k for each week of this (on top of my normal salary). It is worth it for me.

I have "other interests and people in my life", including a girlfriend, friends, outdoor adventuring. One week in ten hardly affects anything, and I can usually trade with a teammate if I want to go away a particular week. Most of my friends have their own careers which make far more onerous demands on their lives for less compensation (doctors, lawyers, nurses, restaurateurs).

I get a page about once a month, maybe. Because I do my job.

Automate well enough and you almost never get called.

That's called being on-call 24/7 for the entire span of your job.

What I find obnoxious, though, is when an employer has standard rules for everyone (e.g. "all prospective applicants must produce a 3 hour at home project as part of the interview process") and then balk at "discrimination" because you'd rather spend your time at your kid's soccer game.

This also strikes me as the height of white-collar privilege, because there are tons of other jobs (e.g. military jobs, oil rig workers, construction jobs, etc.) that require a hell of a lot more family sacrifice, but it's mainly highly paid software developers that protest so much at a couple hour non-9-5 project.

Firstly, as a general rule of thumb, the very best developers who are in the highest demand are unlikely to jump through the hoops, so immediately you're filtering out the very best applicants. As a business owner, that's not something I want to do.

Secondly, and equally importantly, you are likely to get more, young financially stable people with less outside of work commitments (including families which naturally correlate with age which in turn correlates with experience).

If you want to over-index on people with less experience and at the same time reduce the number of applications from people for whom the time commitment is problematic (including but not limited to females who statistically take on a disproportionate percentage of child care responsibilities and some members of traditionally under represented minorities) all you do is reduce the likely diversity of talent you might otherwise get to pick from for your dev team.

I think that this applies for the best anything but, conversely, companies still want them to jump through the hoops. You need to convince the company you're a worthwhile hire and the company, in all of it's arrogance and self-righteous glory, spends little to no effort convincing you its a worthwhile place to work[0].

You see this in questions like, "So, why do you want to work here?" If we're pointedly blunt, we could just say, "You're hiring for 'x', I can do 'x'; also, I like having money versus not having it," but that would be taken as arrogant and/or "not be a team player" or "not very interested in the company or the role".

Let's face it: The world is filling itself with the "drink the kool-aid" types and, so, companies use that as a gatekeeper, so to speak. "A good company fit." "We just want to see if you're a fit for the company."

An experienced <x> is probably far less concerned with the pointless fact 'y' of your company versus, say, the company's culture or if you have matching contributions. If they've put in the time to make themselves an industry expert in something, then - of course - they're going to be a good company fit, at the end of the day. You're just looking for people who will be acquiescent and/or will jump through the hoops. ...but why...? For an entry-level position, I can understand it. For someone who's dev'ed for the last 10 years at 'zed' company, what function does that hurdle hope to accomplish, if not the aforementioned?

[0]-Not really true for Europe, though, so thank feck for that, but have seen it in the states.

I've never failed in taking the latter approach in any interview I've ever faced. (I've been rejected; that's different).

I tend to think this is more about whether you're... 'politically risk-averse', for lack of better terminology.

Almost all of the companies that have found a "real" response to that sort of question bad (e.g. given me the gasp or whatever) have been drone-shops. To some extent it was a sort of 'soft-reject' on my side. A minority in any case.

Maybe one day it'll hurt me. I'm not sure. I think it's a pretty good filter against working with dickheads.

I am in Europe, mind. For a month or so at least. ;)

If I'm doing multiple interviews (which everyone should be doing) and each requires 3 hours of my time (generous underestimate) then what am I going to do? Hire a sitter for a potential job for each of these companies?

Give me whiteboarding interviews -- at least the studying is cross applicable.

Yes, why not? For many people taking time off their existing job during the work day to interview is difficult, but they find a way to do it.

My whole point in this thread is not that interviewing isn't onerous, or that some companies may require more of a time investment than some people are willing to make (and, if that's the case, it's fine to say that job/company isn't for you). What I find obnoxious is when people turn their unwillingness to spend time on the interview or homework as "you are discriminating against me because I am older or because children."

There's a reason there's so much room for plausible deniability in these matters.

I think it depends on how much sysops/devops is involved in your job or if that's a separate team. And how robust your codebase is etc.

WB usage is also testing presentation skills. It is used in companies when you want to present your ideas to others, etc.

Anyway its complicated. Seems like on-site open-book 90 minute real-world problems would be a nice solution.

It is. And it's superior to a take-home test because you know the candidate wrote the code, you know how long it took them, and you can turn it into a pair-programming exercise.

If any non-zero time required to obtain a particular job is descriminatory then every existent hiring process is discriminatory. What do you suggest, drawing lots?

Do people in their mid 40's have less energy for some reason? Do you exercise regularly? Do you get enough sleep? Do you eat healthily? You don't mention anything about a family obligation taking up your time. I am 41 and I don't have any lack of energy issues. I don't think it's a 40's thing, more of decades of bad lifestyle decisions catching up. Which I don't think should be out of bounds for a company to consider when hiring as long as it isn't due to health issues beyond the candidate's control. I guess this distinction can get fuzzy, but I stress that there shouldn't be any reason why in your 40s you should have dramatically lower levels of energy than in your 20s.

Honestly depicting people in their 40s as having less energy does more harm than good. It's just feeding into the perception of older people as less capable when it's not true across the board. It's not OK. I don't have less energy, I have tons of energy and I'm sure many people older than me do as well.

Single people (and empty nesters to be fair) can more often skip some happy hours or some intramural games.

And to be even more fair, once employed, it seems parental excuses (my kids blah blah) get more understanding than single excuses (I need to actually date, my boyfriend blah blah). But I'll wager the interview process is more complicated for people with families.

I'm not happy with this logic. It's harmful. If you extend it further, it motivates everybody to work more hours too.

"If a person is willing to put more effort into a job than another let him do that! Oh and by the way, let's fire those who are not and hire those who are".

And we're back to 12+ hour work day and a lot of great specialists are out of their jobs or forced to sacrifice their time with families, friends, hobbies, physical activities, etc.

There are ways to conduct interviews without whiteboarding AND without take home assignments.

It is what we are here for, if nothing else.

And whiteboard interviews are discriminatory towards people with anxiety who have trouble thinking clearly when they are in the spotlight with all eyes on them, no? Where does the microaggressions game start and end?

My current company does,

-Offer choice between live coding and take home assignment. Regardless of picking the assignment, we do have multiple questions like "given this piece of code find the bug", but they won't require writing actual code.

-Home assignment for remote candidates. With a second round where we discuss and provide feedback (or the candidate explains their thought process) if needed. The candidate is also judged how feedback is received and argued about. If adequate documentation has been supplied we skip the second round too, or just do it in email back n forth.

-And if you have an impressive active blog and an active github profile you probably evade both live coding and assignment (but still get asked the usual questions about architecture, algorithm use, whether you 'll be a good personality/culture-fit etc).

Despite being "nice" our rejection ratio is quite high (at least in my team), and people who picked the assignment themselves/no-pressure applied then bitched about it on glassdoor. Even though they had the option to not have to do it at all. I don't get it.

So Gender/Age/Disabilty discrimination are now microagrssions? It seems from your description of your hiring practice, someone has thought of the implications of take home questions given the choice between live and take home.

My point is, replacing white board questions with entirely take home questions is probably discriminatory.

Do you have any cases to cite for the proposition that take home interview assignments to be per se “Gender/Age/Disability” discrimination? From any court anywhere?

OTOH, I took a Facebook remote test that was timed (I think 30 mins) and the reviewer exactly told me why I didn't clear the test within 24 hours of submission. I don't necessarily agree with everything Facebook does but I really appreciate this level of response.

So, I'll happily do a whiteboard test no matter how unrealistic it is.

Then we have them present their code in a code review in front of the team. This gives a good indication of their ability to explain their thinking and approach clearly and is a good read on their communication skills.

So far, no complaints, though it is true that many of them get a bit wrapped up in the exercise and spend far more than the 2 hours we are asking for.

The only way to know this for sure would be to ask half your applicant pool to do the test, and the other half to go through the exact same battery of interviews sans take home test and then see how many of the offers you extend are accepted.

Obviously this requires that you're a big enough company to split your applicants into two pools and still have a big enough sample size.

Whenever I talk to people involved in hiring about this, they balk at the idea (for okay reasons -- in theory doing that would mean less people filtered out by homework and more applicants rejected during in person interviews that take up engineer time.)

And, knowing the basic CS algorithms and data structures seems to be a good thing, since they make solving problems easier and lead to cleaner solutions. There's a reason they are considered the fundamentals in CS, even if they are baked into most languages nowadays.

A linked list is such a fundamental piece of technology, and so obvious to anyone that's been working in a language for a while, that I feel it's perfectly acceptable to rule out a candidate who cannot write one.

It doesn't have to be perfect, and it doesn't have to have all of the optimizations and utility methods that you find in the standard libraries, but the ability to understand and work with a node that has a value and a pointer to the next node is kind of bare-minimum competency, isn't it?

I mean, I understand the linked list quite well, but in my multi decade software career, I've probably actually implemented one less than once a decade. So I think it's a very unrealistic interview question, and will sigh quite hard (internally) when asked to implement one in an interview.

You just can't please everyone...

My point is that a linked list is such a simple concept that anyone with real programming experience should be able to write a basic implementation.

It's a Shibboleth; I only care about your ability to perform the task because it tells me something else about you.

It almost levels the playing field in the sense that since no one actually writes these things, we're probably all equally half clumsy with them :)

Is this a good reason not to ask it in an interview?

I'd expect any competent software engineer to be able to implement a linked list without too much trouble. It's maybe not a great interview question (depending on your point of view, you may not consider it to contribute much positive or negative hiring signal), but I don't consider it a "gotcha" question the way a lot of people seem to.

If your engineers aren't writing clean, readable, maintainable code that solves problems as simply as possible (ie, gorgeous), I'm not sure your hiring practices are doing you any good.

I'm not hiring artists I'm hiring engineer's. I'm not hiring your for your gorgeous code in x language, I'm hiring for problem solving skills and communication.

I agree with the second half (problem solving and communication) but take some issue with the the way you dismissed the art of it all. Maybe we have different ideas of what an artist is?

I tend to think of software in more blue-collar terms myself, perhaps more like a carpenter (who has to consider more than just aesthetics, but certainly can't ignore them) than a violinist, but my earlier comment was just continuing the established metaphor. Either way, I get the sense we agree more than we disagree here.

Bonus points for making code reusable, reliable, readable, testable, functional or what-the-heck-ever-able.

Unless you write code and run and compile it, there's nothing to be discussed.

The violin is not generally considered chordal instrument. While you can technically pluck all the strings at once, or bow two strings at once, it's most often used for melodic and not harmonic parts. ;)

Problem solved

Maybe not a bad means of ensuring that “this should only take an hour of your time” really means that.

The flip side is that fast and good aren’t one in the same, but I don’t think there’s any perfect answers here.

Most take home submissions I’ve seen are rejected — because of copy-pasted stack overflow code patched together, incorrect solutions, or poor style or organization.

The right way to do a take home exam if you must do this: give them something real and pay them consulting rates for it. If the result is good, you've hired a great worker. If the result is bad, you will know, they'll get a few bucks for their time, and no hard feelings. If you can't screen them to the point where you you can't screen for decent odds on a take home, you should consider a new career. Maybe picking potatoes.

I know trend-chasing seems to be common in the web development industry, but I would be wary of anyone who likes to make such changes for the sake of showing off or otherwise.

I have a dog. A young dog that requires a lot of work around the clock. Do you also think I deserve concessions?

At least learning of new things in CSS will give you new useful knowledge which you can potentially apply in future.

At least whiteboard requieres practicing for real once in a life time.