It depends on the procedure, somewhat.

For example, it's very tempting for a company to send out tests before doing much resume screening. Why should I spend 30 seconds looking at a resume when I could have the candidate spend an hour on a test, and save myself 30 seconds?

Or what if I set a take-home test which is supposed to take 1 hour, but also supposed to really to stretch candidates' ability and give the best candidates a chance to shine? Probably a lot of average candidates will give themselves a bit of extra time - and before you know it, I'm sending a "1 hour" test that takes an average of 4 hours.

Take-home tests are a lot less objectionable if you can properly guard against these problems.

I definitely agree that the second issue is tricky to get right.

But for your first point, that wouldn't seem to make much sense given the time investment from the company as well. It takes time to review take home tests, much more time than it takes to review a resume or even for a recruiter to have a quick phone call with the candidate. So why would they send out a test to someone first?

I've usually seen something more like this, which I think generally works fairly well:

1. Initial resume screening 2. Quick phone call with the recruiter 3. Usually some kind of technical call/interview with developer(s), engineering manager or similar, at the very least some discussion of experience and background 4. Send out the test, review it, call the candidate back in to discuss if they want to 5. Probably some other stage at the end

Home tests can be scored automatically with test cases.

HN people seem to line up 20 interviews and spend a week doing them. Take homes are untenable in that situation as half the interviews would still be a full workweek. I soured heavily on take homes during an active job search phase as I was already interviewing 4 hours a day with 3-6 people. I had a pile of companies, would accept any of them on the surface, and it was just a matter of grabbing one.

Many interview at a much less aggressive pace than that and I would prefer a take home when I am out of leetcode practice.

> HN people seem to line up 20 interviews and spend a week doing them.

Having mentored a lot of college grads and also interviewed a lot of candidates, it's actually extremely rare for people to line up a huge number of interviews in a single week. It can be done if you really, really treat it as a numbers game, but it's not how most people do it.

> Take homes are untenable in that situation as half the interviews would still be a full workweek

Take homes shouldn't be taking a full workweek.

If anything, take-homes make it easier to stack a lot of interviews because you can do them at your leisure in your own time.

> I was already interviewing 4 hours a day with 3-6 people

I think this is the disconnect: You're taking time off of work for live interviews, but take-homes come out of "extra" time. If you're interviewing full time, a take-home is still more flexible than a live interview.

Here's the thing: take home assignments typically come near the beginning of an interview process, even before one progresses to an on-site (or equivalent). Understandably, very few companies give a take home in place of the entire on-site. But, a take home generally doesn't get you out of any part of the 4-6 hour dog and pony show. Which would you rather do: 30 minute recruiter chat + 60 minute technical phone screen with a human + 4-6 hour on-site, or the same process with a "1 hour" take home that actually ends up taking 4 hours in place of the technical phone screen?

Incidentally, I have the same criticism of TripleByte. Sure, they get you on-site with companies faster, but their process takes a significant number of hours (essentially equivalent to its own on-site), and it doesn't get you out of any part of the prospective employer's on-site.

This too. I have been ghosted on way too many take home assignments.

Same here. I did a take home that took 6 hours. Sent it in and then a few minutes later received a rejection. I'll never do that again. I now reject any take homes that will take more than 90 minutes. That's by my estimation - not the company's - I've seen many companies way underestimate the time it should take which is a sign that they've never had their own employees try it.

Take homes are bad because the time investment is asymmetrical. A company can just say to everyone who applies to do the take home test because there's really no investment on their part. At least with an interview, you know the company is investing an equal amount of time into the process.

Triplebyte used to be helpful because it did allow you to skip the initial phone screen but that doesn't seem to be the case much anymore.

> Having mentored a lot of college grads and also interviewed a lot of candidates, it's actually extremely rare for people to line up a huge number of interviews in a single week. It can be done if you really, really treat it as a numbers game, but it's not how most people do it.

What people need to remember is that there's a very real pecking order. Everyone will do Google's take-home but the local business paying local CoL/Prevailing wages? By the time some get to their take home, the A players are already landing in SFO for their final rounds.

The people that are the most hirable won't have time to do 20 interviews, they'll get offers almost right away.

> I think this is the disconnect: You're taking time off of work for live interviews, but take-homes come out of "extra" time. If you're interviewing full time, a take-home is still more flexible than a live interview.

The thing is, with a live interview it's one hour of their time for one hour of mine. With a take-home, it could be 4 hours of mine and... ten minute for them to look at the code and run a test suite on it. So as a rule of thumb, I always suggest favoring live interviews (they are investing more time therefore they place a higher value on the potential hire).

Oh, take homes are fine without the interviewing numbers game. They just break when you do that.

Many of the take homes I encountered also had rapid turnarounds. I would have 48 hours from Tuesday afternoon. A couple of times I was up at 3 in the morning as I had two of them due and had to abandon one of them as I just couldn't stay awake longer.

In hindsight, I should have realized the folly of that earlier, but I was eager to get as many paths going as possible.

My favorite (and only) take home interview assignment. >> here is the problem, research as much as you want however you want, and take as long as you want... when you are done please format it as a 'xyz-ide' project on github and we'll get back to you in a day.

I hate this and find this just as academic and problematic as the whiteboard and quiz styles. Success in software development is about making the right trade offs to deliver while saving cost (ie your time). When you leave it so open an abstract, the dev looses the ability to discern this. "Production" standards are entirely based on context of the project and very specific requirements. Do you need structure logging, or rate limiting, or error handling, or notifications, or system status ect.. With do you already have systems in place to integrate these. Do you need a custom solution (like your own lambda engine) or do the off the shelve solutions (like aws lambda) meet the requirements.

> HN people seem to line up 20 interviews and spend a week doing them.

Somehow they also seem to get all their offers around the same time to leverage them against each other.

Well, this is a function of lining up so many. Apply for 50, get interviews at 30, you end up with maybe 1 in 3 have aligning timelines, pass 1 in 3 of those, and you have 3 offers to choose from at the same time before they explode.

Lol. Offers don't really explode on timelines less than a few weeks. If you get pressure from a company to accept their offer in less than a week or 2, that's a red flag, especially if they want you to start right now.

Ah, interesting. I admit that I am often a schmuck that takes contracts at face value. I have always had it be 24-72 hours. I have even been asked if I would accept an offer immediately (without knowing the salary range or whether I would get permanent remote).

> HN people seem to line up 20 interviews and spend a week doing them

source?

The last time I did more than 2 interviews during a job search was 1999.

I assume you are typically hired through network?

Actually, the opposite. Always cold.

Edit: Oops, sorry, that's not true. 2002 was network. Everything since has been cold.

The best process I went through was for a job I didn't get, but had me do a take home project that took about 4 hrs and they gave me a $300 USD amazon gift card. The biggest problem is it has really limited my tolerance for a lot of BS interview requests that previously I might have considered.

time limits put an upper bound on how long youre spending on it which is good for a lot of people. ive given take home tests and some people clearly put more time on it than we expected.

as an applicant, ive refused takehomes that were auto-sent on receiving the application, but if its after a phone call with the hiring manager or engineer its not so bad. but then, i did end up having to defend why i didnt do a bunch of parts ancillary to the assignment - 'why didnt you build a config loading system?' 'uh cause i timeboxed it and that gives you fairly little signal compared to the business logic'

Yes. There is no silver bullet for this problem. However, interview goes both ways. Hiring team to judge a candidate and the candidate judging whether to go through the process and want to work there.

When I went through the job search, I did close out a few applications because I found out I wasn't too interested in their description of the role (after a conversation with more details than that was in the job posting), or simply if their screening process wasn't worth my time. The one I lamented about pass through those interest tests as the job genuinely fascinated me.

It really depends on what you are given.

A take home that is 1-2 hours (what might be the length of an in person) is fine.

A take home that is 10 hours of work on the other hand

Yeah, even when you are unemployed a 10 hour take-home is a bit abusive. I had to bow out on one take home that would have cost me actual money to set up a development environment with all the ancillary software, plus the three separate programs in three different languages. LOL, no, I'm not going to spend cash on AWS to set up a dev cluster with paid software.

The two biggest problems with takehomes:

1. They do not scale horizontally. You do a takehome and get rejected, then your effort has become worthless when applying to other companies. Versus grinding leetcode - it scales across a huge breadth of many different companies.

2. Often times a takehome is not. instead of an leetcode interview. It's in addition to the leetcode interview. So you end up needing to practice leetcode anyways. Now you just have more work to do - work that doesn't horizontally scale.

I have to chime in with an anedoctal. Chainalaysis, a unicorn blockchain company, was giving take home assignments a few months ago for new grad positions. Seems like enough people refused and they have now switched to a 45 min timed camera on HireVue