I think "senior" has at least two types. There's the FAANG-alum seniors who are used to and will put up with full-day or even multi-day interviews full of leetcode shit or "gotcha" edge-case quizzes about language features you trained yourself to avoid a decade ago or take-home assignments ("4 hours" sure except the other candidate put in 12 hours and lied about it, so...) for that sweet, sweet crazy-high comp. Unless you're offering these sorts a CTO position, they're not applying to your non-FAANG-tier-comp-and-security-and-presige company. Period.

Then there's senior in most of the rest of the industry. We don't do long, annoying interviews. If your process drags on we've already accepted one of our other offers. We don't make FAANG money (mostly) but we also don't put up with horseshit. You want me, or not? If not, 100 other companies do, so bye and have a nice day.

> ("4 hours" sure except the other candidate put in 12 hours and lied about it, so...)

Recently went through this. Got an email at 2pm saying "please run through this exercise". Looked at the doc, then decided to hit it. I submitted everything back before 6pm. It was around 2.5 hours, and I took a short break in the middle. I screen-captured my whole session (not sent in) but to have a little souvenir of the exercise. There's really not much way I could have 'cheated' on the time because there was only 4 hrs tops between sending the email and submitted my results.

Their estimate was 'we expect this to take 2-3 hours', and they weren't all that wrong. I could see someone less experienced taking more than 2 hours just on one of the bad queries - unless you've seen the pattern(s) before it's hard to recognize and refactor quickly.

> FAANG-alum seniors who are used to and will put up with full-day or even multi-day interviews full of leetcode shit or "gotcha" edge-case quizzes

As a current FAANG employee, I didn’t put up with that bullshit from anyone including FAANG companies.

People say this and I have yet to find a company that doesn't do some kind of technical assessment. But I have seen multiple coworkers with 10-20 years of experience as software engineers with glowing recommendations get fired because they couldn't write software. So I'm a little happier to have some bar for myself and coworkers to clear.

> I'm never, ever doing a 4 hour assignment for you.

Boo hoo, you need to spend four hours of your life to take home multiples of the median American family's income. It blows my mind how conceited some people in this industry can be, and I'm glad I don't work with them. This is one reason why the take home is a great filter.

If I'm interviewing at multiple companies and they all do that, that's 4 hours per company I want to check out. And let's be honest, most of these I've been asked to do weren't reasonable to do, and do well, and double check, in four hours, despite the claim. Eight hours is more reasonable to do them properly, usually.

If I interview at three places, that's three days of unpaid work (or 6+ evenings after I've already worked a full day at my normal job), and if I'm already making "multiples of the median American family's income" elsewhere, then it becomes less attractive to put up with that, especially if other companies aren't asking for it.

Like I just can't find the energy to put up with Amazon's 2.5 hour span of unbroken time take-home test, no matter how desperate they make themselves sound or how often they contact me (which is almost every week at this point). When I last considered it, I was already having trouble juggling just finding holes in the day to manage about 30 interviews I ended up doing, across about 8 companies. I had no energy to study for, and then do, that exam on top of it (I did do three 45-60 minute exams, across three evenings, for three other companies, though).

> Like I just can't find the energy to put up with Amazon's 2.5 hour span of unbroken time take-home test

By the sounds of it, that test would be the best bit of your time at Amazon.

I assure you that the sort of person who is qualified for the original submitters job is not doing a “take home” test to get into Amazon. (raises hand).

Haha, yeah that certainly hasn't helped motivate me to go through their process.

You're not responding in good faith with your "boo hoo" comment. No one is crying here. The point here is there are many, many companies that don't require a 4 hour take home technical assessment, and thus people can decide to do them or not.

The post is about this topic, so the responses are about the topic. You think that 4 hour take home technical assessments are a reasonable filter. Awesome, you are a person who can apply for the position op is focused on.

Exactly the point they're missing - if everyone does it, it's part of the shit sandwich you have to eat. But if you're the only one doing it, there are entire classes of applicants that will pass you by.

Hiding that you're going to spring it on people should give you numbers, by the people who ghost you the moment it appears, if you wanted to test for it.

> Boo hoo, you need to spend four hours of your life to take home multiples of the median American family's income. It blows my mind how conceited some people in this industry can be, and I'm glad I don't work with them. This is one reason why the take home is a great filter.

Point is they don't need to, and companies that insist on it are hurting only themselves.

> But I have seen multiple coworkers with 10-20 years of experience as software engineers with glowing recommendations get fired because they couldn't write software

I can imagine multiple reasons for this to occur at a company and a bunch of them reflect poorly on the build and architecture at the company

The problem isn’t the four hour take home. It’s the multiple interviews then surprise we need you to interview for two days with our junior engineers all from MIT and Stanford and go over how you think you would improve our systems. Thanks but no thanks.

Agree, I will laugh at you asking me to do anything at home before we have a contract

Like... interview?

But isn't the alternative to take home assignment leetcoding on whiteboards? Last time I was interviewing in the US market was in 2017 and it was literally just these two options. And the assignments tended to be long - like a week long. (tbh there were a few companies that pre-offered and just wanted one general discussion round with the team but they felt shady and desperate, and one was a literal consultancy)

Could someone articulate what's the norm now for non-FAANG pure-tech companies? I might go back to the open market next year after grad school since I don't have much of a network in Canada.

(I have decent 10y+ experience at startups and a unicorn, in both big data analytics and full stack applications and I'm good at system design, take home assignments and even live coding but really suck at physical white boarding complex algorithms with someone literally watching over me)

I think where the disconnect is occurring is that leetcoding on whiteboards, and home assignments are not the norm for many of us who are Senior.

I have 20y+ experience in startups, unicorn, large companies, big data analytics, full stack applications, and system design.

I am not asked to interview with whiteboard coding when someone wants to hire me from a referral. They are glorified meet and greets.

This is what having a network of people who have worked with you before, and have seen your productivity does. You don't interview the same way other people do, people want you for you, because they know that it doesn't matter what the technology is, you're going to provide a crazy level of value, and they want that level of value in their situation.

I’m not exactly a “dev ops” person like the original person is looking for. I am the classical definition of dev ops. A software developer who knows cloud and consults with companies on how to develop “cloud natively”.

Before my current job, my last three jobs (2014, 2016, and 2018) were as a bog standard “enterprise” Senior software engineer/team lead/de facto “architect” who was hired to help the company mature. I got my job by talking to the manager, director, CTO based on my network and discussing my past successes and how I would go about helping then with their real world problems.

I am 99% sure if and when I leave my current job in the cloud consulting department at BigTech and probably go back to smaller companies I won’t be asked to do a “take home test”. My network is stronger now than it was before I came.

I have four projects on GitHub with over 50 stars between them. I've submitted PRs for scapy and dnspython. Where's yours, recruiter? Need to pass me to someone? Ok. Good, now we have something to talk about / through. That's the technical part.

I'm senior. Got something I haven't seen? That and some stalking on LinkedIn or emailing and asking for a resume or just to say "hi", seems to be working for some recruiters out there.

OP is hiring for a devops role and has to mention k8s in their pleading. Anybody who mentions k8s to me as something I need to know immediately wins a quizzing regarding what their assets are and what are they doing with it which is so unique that they'd need my expertise; that's usually the end of it. To be clear: I am senior enough to know that doing k8s safely would be THE job, so not making it THE job means you don't meet my quality standards. Other people need my help more than you do, and I don't care what you pay.

I'm "senior" at least in the sense of having been around long enough to be called an old fart. My last two iterations involved:

1) a 2 hour conversation with one of the founders, followed by a 2 week tryout (paid consulting), followed by a job offer that I accepted. This was through a HN Who Is Hiring post.

2) a round of multi-hour onsite interviews involving white boards, live coding, pairing, etc., but no take-homes. This was through Triplebyte, which organized everything.

There were a couple of other discussions involving take-homes (one of them in good faith on the company's part, the other a little more doubtful) and those two experiences convinced me to not do them any more.

I guess I could imagine a take-home project if it was (through discussion) something that interested me and that I thought would be useful and I could keep the code afterwards, to re-use for other purposes.

I've been duped into take-homes a few times. The one time I wasn't ghosted after submitting, they asked me to come in for an on-site... to do leetcode.

If you are paying FAANG salary and giving real stock in a public company, you can insist on jumping through more hoops.

But if you are a medium size enterprise company that isn’t paying that type of compensation, you can’t.