There comes a point in an interview where you're not sure you want the job given what you've seen, and any judgement of the candidate's ability once they've checked out is useless.

You can learn a lot about a person by what questions they chose to ask you, but only if it's not a thing tacked onto the end of a long interview. If they haven't gotten much time to ask you questions, they only have your interview questions to go on. Which you know are not representative of the kind of work you do (but then, why are you asking them?)

So because you only ever talked to them about things that could readily be had off the shelf, and this is the only information they have, they can't know if you're bad at interviewing or some psycho who spends all their time reinventing wheels and then demanding that other people be impressed by your insanity.

The chances of the latter are bigger than you think. So if it's down to you or another opening, they'll take the other opening, and then you've wasted everyone's time.

Oh man I can relate, I once took a home project which took around 6hrs and then was subsequently invited for a full day of white-boarding with 10 different people throughout the day.

Didn't hit it off with the last interviewer so it was a no-go.

If a take-home is required I'd at least expect a code review over it and focus the rest of the interview process on soft skills rather than trivia questions that are answered essentially by the take-home exercise.

This is exactly the solution I'm imagining. You do a take home after the initial soft screen(s) but prior to coming on-site. Onsite the focus is on the work you did for the take home--discussion like "why did you model X that way?", "if a new requirement Y was added, how would it impact the design", etc. And of course all the normal soft talk and cultural stuff. Just don't put them in front of a board and ask them to solve something under pressure, please.

I had that exactly experience with a start up and it was awesome! They also were very generous in the the time given to solve it (2w).

Ten people? 10?! I guess if it's really 5 slots with 2 interviewers (though that has its own set of disadvantages, on both sides), I guess. But, that just sounds like a distressingly long day.

It was, 5 meetings including lunch. Each meeting had at least 2 interviewers and I had lunch with my prospective manager and another senior peer.

  1. 2 pms - collab and project management questions.
  2. Trivia Q&A with 2 devs and tech projects
  3. Lunch with Dir. Eng, and senior dev.
  4. Whiteboard leetcode with A researcher and a junior dev.
  5. Systems design with Dir. Eng and a senior devops
  6. Chat sessionr for questions with VP of Eng.

Needles to say I was burn out on the systems interview after having been in interviewing mode all day and the interviewers were definitely mentally drained, nitpicking on a lot of low leve elements on a systems design task.

2. is the biggest thing for me. Exactly the same experience. I would be happy with take-homes if companies actually trusted them. The biggest reason I'm willing to do them is to avoid the whiteboarding.

Of course from their perspective I could be getting someone else to do it for me or something. Or maybe the take-home leaked (which becomes more probable as the company grows).

I’m surprised this is your experience.

At my current employer, that’s exactly how we approach hiring. I send the candidate a take-home that broadly covers the basic tech skills they need to be effective in their role (implement a simple test api, some questions about scaling web apps in production, and a possible architecture sketch for a described system). It’s expected to be around 4 hours of work. If they pass that, the interview is free of technical topics - we just talk about your past experience and assess whether you’d be a good fit for the team.

Is this not how other take-home assignments work?

I can confirm this has also been my experience. I have spent multiple hours on take-home tests only to be ghosted. In no case have I ever been able to skip the whiteboard hazing because I did well on a take-home.

I'm interested to know who your employer is, if you're comfortable saying.

Not comfortable sharing my exact employer, but it’s a small biotech in the Netherlands.

I've never seen it done that way -- just used as a pre-screen for an onsite that is the typical code-on-a-whiteboard scenario. Had one place that used an at home test + a one hour task in the office on a laptop they provided + several more whiteboard sessions (so long they split it over 2 days).

I too think that's how things should work if a take-home is involved, but I haven't experienced this yet. There are times I've gotten past the take-home and then had to do a technical _phone_ interview after - not even an onsite.

How many candidates do you have doing a take-home per position?

Roughly 5-10 I’d say. We are able to weed out a good chunk in the phone screen (which is done by me or another engineer, not a recruiter)

Yes, it should be. This is how we do it

Do you feel comfortable saying who "we" is?