Me: "I've got this repo on Github with millions of downloads and 10k stars. It's at least 20k lines of my own code. Would that be good to demonstrate my coding ability?"

Them: "Haha, no, that'd be too much work for us. Please do the test instead."

Me: "Fine."

Then they rejected me because I used GET instead of POST. Clearly that shows I have no idea how to code.

That was a large (1000+ employee) YC company, by the way.

By the way, thanks for VCCodeVim!

OK, I'm honestly curious here. What was the request, and why did you make such a decision? Do you think it is the right approach in this case, or that it's an insignificant mistake that does not represent a person's understanding of HTTP protocol?

I remember hearing about at least one story where using GET instead of POST lead to disastrous consequences, as some robot crawled all over the "delete" links - but I have to admit, I can't imagine how it would happen without other significant design flaws happening as well (as "delete" links being public or robot being able to crawl under authenticated user's identity). This sounds like an error that can cause irrational irritation by the reviewer, but I can't imagine it being the sole reason to decide that the author can't code.

But, IMO, even if you don't know, it's the kind of thing you learn once in code review and then don't worry about again.

Just using POST for everything is a pattern I've seen becoming more popular recently.

IMHO, GET (as of today) gas the issue that it does not support a body. If I‘m executing a search (an idempodent action), how can I nicely pass a JSON object configuring the search? I‘ll just use POST for that... So then we‘re at the point where the url does not work anymore because we have a POST /findEmployee; POST /findContract; ... instead of GET /employee and GET /contract.

Maybe I‘m wrong here, but it doesn‘t like nice in my eyes using POST in that way.

What's funny is that it's literally their job. They receive money for doing it.

Doing a take home is not paid. I have no idea why these recruiters assume it's ok to ask candidates for multi hours work without any kind of compensation.

Also- thanks for VScode vim! I use it and love it. I've always wanted to reach out cause there's lots of features I wish would get implemented. Though even without those it's one of the better vim emulations I've tried, and I've tried many!

The author doesn't appear to understand the economics of the hiring company; it's about time & effort to filter and the cost of making a bad hire. I cannot give every application 1-2 hours of review if I get 100+ resumes. I can't give every interviewee a half-day assessment to get the very poor signal/noise ratio answers to questioning methods suggested. I can't hire easy and then fire easy. I can't invest weeks of work from myself and other mentors on non-ideal potentials. I know this means I pass over great candidates and that really sucks and is totally unfair. I'm sure that's happended to me as well. The problem is nothing presented here is a better alternative.

This is perhaps the biggest misconception of hiring, that out of some misguided notion of "fairness" or "objectivity" you have to treat every candidate exactly the same. In theory it seems like a good principle, but the road to hell is paved in good intentions. In practice, this results in arbitrarily designed standard tests which are only superficially fair, and systematically weed out people who aren't good at test taking or auditions.

Go through all the resumes quickly, pick out the top candidates, and start from the top! Focus most of your time on researching your few top candidates, and if one of them seems good, then hire them, and end your hiring process. You may only have to interview 1, 2, maybe 3 people at most. This saves everyone time: your own time, and the time of the 100+ people who would otherwise be interviewed and rejected, because there's only 1 job opening.

Obviously if you interview your top candidates, and you find them lacking, then keep working your way down the stack. But going through the entire stack of candidates is a huge waste of time, a pointless exercise, totally counterproductive.

Don't do "screening" interviews. Only do "hiring" interviews.

Also, anecdotally after interviewing hundreds of candidates, I’ve found resumes to have a relatively high false positive rate. Surprising numbers of engineers look great on paper but can’t write working code for semi-complex problems when tested, even accounting for interview anxiety.

If you didn't hire them and compare them to new hires who have bad resumes but did well on your test how would you know?

You can't objectivity judge a candidate by your test results only. Otherwise your test is just randomly filtering people. Until you do that you don't know how effective your test is. You could be flipping a coin and getting the same results.

How have you accounted for interview anxiety?

1. I try to make the parameters of the interview as friendly as possible — language of their choice, don’t have to worry about code style or computational complexity, or talk while they’re coding, just write working code that solves the problem. They can use google freely. I’m there as a resource to talk through their solution, answer questions, and help them get unstuck if needed.

2. The algorithm to solve the question doesn’t require a trick and there are many viable solutions so most candidates can verbally explain to me a working algorithm quickly, +- a couple edge cases.

3. Candidates often get visibly flustered or hung up on irrelevant details, or unsure what exactly I want for them, and I focus on noticing this. I try to guide them down a correct path if they’re close and tell them not to over-architect if they start doing that.

Despite all this, too manly candidates do not have a dependable metaprocess for writing working code - a common scenario is they write code, it gives the wrong result, they drop some print statements to debug, but can’t effectively trace the program to figure out why they’re getting the debug output and so they guess and try to fix the wrong thing, causing further problems. I know that some of this is nerves but it can’t account for all of it.

Why not?

If you've never experienced severe situational anxiety, you may not know how debilitating it can be.

And then, maddeningly, perhaps just minutes after the interview is over, you return to your "normal" self, and start to think about what you would have done in that situation if you weren't nervous.

It's basically stage fright, which can be terrifying if you're not used to the stage.

Still, I do have some EQ. A lot of candidates exhibit visible anxiety and then get into a rhythm and calm down when they start coding. Or they visibly calm down once I start asking them questions about how they're thinking and coax them towards viable implementation. On the flip side, a lot of candidates actually exhibit overconfidence running in the wrong direction, which I try to lightly mitigate but can't prevent in all cases without giving an unfair advantage.

I remember an interview training exercise, which also covered resume screening. Each person got the same stack of resumes, and the instructor said, "You have 60 seconds to pick out the top 3 you'd like to bring in for an interview. Find them." At the end of the exercise we found that we all basically picked out people who were a lot like us. White people picked out "whiter-sounding" names, women picked more women, etc. Also, Ken Thompson's resume was one of them (with a different name) and nobody picked him.

I think the point was that human eyeballs and brains are terrible at objectively or fairly pre-filtering.

Well, by quickly I didn't mean only 60 seconds. :-)

> in a way that is not subject to personal (conscious or unconscious) bias?

In my opinion, a common conceit is that it's possible to design a process that is not subject to bias. It's not possible. There will be bias, no matter what process you choose. It's thought that "quiz show" style interviews are "objective", but if you look at the results, they're clearly not helping. They're not increasing diversity. The poor results speak for themselves. So then some people look at the results of this so-called "fair" process and conclude that minorities are just worse at coding, because that's what the tests say. To me, that approach and attitude is even worse than just acknowledging personal bias.

The only way to try to counteract unconscious bias is to be conscious of it. Admit it, and keep it in mind while you're going through your hiring process. Keep it in mind while you're filtering the résumés. Keep it in mind while you're interviewing. But don't try to pretend like you can eliminate it entirely from the process, because then you're just deluding yourself and everyone else.

Good way to put it. Exactly.

This is an entirely self-created problem, not for you personally, I mean for the industry. We are against "credentialling" so signals like personal recommendations, alma mater, or work history at prestigious firms are overlooked.

My employer tried Hackerrank for a while, we abandoned it when we realised that the candidates we really wanted (e.g. based on personal recommendations from existing employees) were dropping out of the pipeline as soon as the Hackerrank link was sent to them. And the ones we were getting were good at Hackerrank and not much else.

Your process has already failed if you're considering 100+ people!

First, you should never be getting 100+ resumes for a role. If you are, you need to write better job descriptions and/or get a better recruiter who knows how to match to the job description.

With that in place, you (I) are getting about 10-20 resumes at most. Then what I do is read them and rank them. Takes less than two hours.

I'll only interview the top five from this stack. I'm happy to give each of these five people however many hours of attention it takes, they and I deserve it.

This way the people who didn't get to the interview round have not wasted any of their time which is the most respectful way to handle it.

Tech job postings are the absolute worst. Anyone who's having trouble with hiring in any way needs to start there. Everyone in tech knows that job postings are a joke, which is why you're told to apply to jobs even if you're not qualified, and then companies complain about the applicant pool. It's their own fault!

The "excuse" is almost always "HR". But this just tells the applicant your company is a bureaucratic nightmare that few sane applicants would want to join.

The irony is that the tech hiring process, especially the job postings, encourage the fakers to apply. You're practically beginning fakers to apply.

The most honest, scrupulous people tend to only apply for jobs where they're 100% qualified according to the job posting. So the system, which hires people who don't actually meet the listed qualifications, is systematically selecting against the honest applicants. Honest people can even be driven out of tech in virtue of being honest.

Remote roles get a _lot_ more applications than on site. In my experience getting 100 applications is quite common for such a role.

Why not? Maybe you should address that problem. It would certainly make things a lot easier.

You can always say it's because the company doesn't attract good enough candidates, but good luck with that in a competitive dev market in a large european capital.

I appreciate the authors honesty in his obliviousness of being on "the other side of the table" and I think it's clear that the author is living in a bubble that doesn't correspond to reality for people recruiting.

And this is supposed to be one of those bog-standard question that interviewees are always told by job interview guides to be prepared for!

I agree that people that have OSS work to show are much rarer to come by, and FWIW, they tend to do better in interviews IME. My theory is that it's not that the OSS resume bullet point itself sets them apart, but rather that they polished their skills more through the hard work they put into their OSS projects.

If that's not you, then you need to be painfully, painfully explicit about it, and some people still won't believe you because interviewers just lie all the time.

Obviously sharing backend trade secrets would be a big no-no. I've had people say they can't talk about their work due to NDAs, and that's completely fine in my books. We just move on to another topic.

FWIW, even when a candidate mentions having an OSS project, I refrain from looking at the actual code, and especially doing code review. I don't consider an interview setting the appropriate place to be grilling people on why they used a while loop instead of a for loop or whatever, since a) nearly everyone writes "bad" code occasionally and b) often things are done in certain ways for some good reason that isn't really relevant to my goal of evaluating the candidate. At the end of the day, the interviewer's goal IMHO should be to get as many signals they can from the conversation and make a determination about whether the candidate meets/exceeds a minimum threshold of competence

I think the at home project is the most lenient way to test someone because they aren’t pressured to solve a problem on the spot, instead they are in the comfort of their own home and can reference whatever documentation they would need, just like they would in a real position.