This sits somewhere in the middle for me. On one hand I probably would not do this exercise for most companies but I probably would for a company I was excited about. It kind of makes sense if they are getting high volume of applications, you definitely will miss great candidates doing this but does it not also servce as a self-selection for the type of candidate they want?

Curious if the co-founder who was posting in here will share his take.

Yes I agree. I think you could easily add if the pr is merged we reward it with some money etc and it would be perfect.

To give more context from an employee's point of view [just my opinion and might be completely wrong]

For a job switch, I need to spend time in three different stages:

---------------

Preparation:

Leetcode (Blind 75) : 150 hours

System Design + DBMS + OS + Networking : 100 hours

Behavioural Questions (preparing STAR format answers): 10-20 hours

------------

Application:

Avg time for sending 500 applications: 20 hours (Assuming 1 application every 2.5 minutes)

-------------

Interviews:

Let's say I got 25 callbacks and 10 of them asked for takehome.

Person to person interviews time: 25 * 3 = 75 hours

Takehomes: 10 * 6 hours = 60 hours.

-------------

All in all, I'm already spending 415 hours of unpaid work to get x% of salary increment. Not including the side projects or hackathons we may need.

So having a takehome exercise asking to make an active contribution to the company is....bad. Sure i can reject it but not everyone will. which is what led us into the multiple rounds of algo interviews hellhole.

I apologize if what I'm saying is harsh. All I want is for leadership to see us as humans with families and not monkeys jumping through hoops.

But you must remember that they don't want you. They already have more applicants than they can handle.

The trouble is that the leadership does see you as human, which results in them trying to say "Go away! You are not welcome here." as politely as possible.

Not harsh and I don't disagree. On the flip side though if they have a large volume of applicants and they are a sub 50 company right now, it probably does not matter what kind of hoops they make people jump through, they will most likely identify candidate that match their fit. What I am saying is that nobody is wrong in this situation.

415 hours??

Well this is the problem with tech hiring. Not convinced an IQ test or other “unstudyable” exam wouldn’t be better.

Hell maybe nepotism was the way to go all along. Do other industries require 10 weeks of full time practice to get a gig?

It is not a problem with tech hiring in general, just hiring where there are millions of people lined up down the street vying for the same position. To be sure, the job will still most likely go to a friend or relative, but if you are willing to jump through insane hoops you might also be considered. But it is to be taken as a hint that says: "Unless you are extra super sure that you are so special that we can't turn you down, don't waste your time, or ours."

Most other jobs, including Mom & Pop Tech Co., are happy if anyone applies at all and will take what they can get.

My industry is related to the power grid. I've worked at two amazing companies. The first had me come out for a 3 hour interview for a summer internship where they accessed my work ethic and culture fit. Once I graduated, I was immediately given an offer letter. The second job required most of a day to interview and I had to prepare a PPT and then got an offer. I also interviewed for another gig that did like four one-hour interviews spread out across a month. What software developers do sounds like absolute hell. My industry has very high demand and very low supply of experienced candidates at the moment though.

If it’s a job that wisely does not emphasize leetcode, you can skip those 150 hours of that.

yea but a lot of the super high paying ones do, so it's a small price to pay for a large paycheck

I’m in a privileged position and have never done leetcode.

I have worked at multiple FAANGs and even small startups. I have never once seen anyone care about leetcode, GitHub punchcards, stack overflow score, or any of the social media stuff people boast about here. Literally none of this fits in to any evaluation rubric.

All it says is your hobby is programming.

Huh? It’s not about some profile scores it’s about practice. Leetcode type problems are asked at most (all) FAANG like companies.

They want candidates who care about their product, not people who merely rank companies by compensation, subject a constraint on time spent preparing. If you don't particularly care what you are working on, you would be better off at a big company.

On homework problems for jobs, I have a strict policy of "no more than 4 hours of free work, and I retain full copyrights to that work." A lot of people are picking up on the first clause of that policy, and companies seem to be adapting, but the second clause still isn't common yet.

When the company is asking for open source contributions to an open source code base, as it is in this particular case, that second clause is clearly a deal breaker.

That's a pretty smart way for them to seed the ecosystem with open source connectors! Are you implying that that's what they were really trying to do here? Or do you think it was a genuine filter technique?

If they're paying you for your time, this is kind of smart.

If they're not then it's a scandal.

Edited :|

They can easily make it not a scandal by changing things so applicants contribute to an open source project that they don't directly benefit from as a business. Easy solution

Let's just make qdrant to pinecone/weaviate/redis/etc. data exporters, that would make the company super happy! Free labor benefiting their competitors.

Why pay when you can get free labour?

You could always release and license under BUSL or AGPL or some other business non friendly and relicense if you got the job.

You can simply publish it without any license, in which case you reserve all rights.

Nobody is going to hire you if you can't follow basic instructions.

I don’t see a single such submission in their pull requests, open or closed, in the past couple weeks.

Read that comment more closely: they didn't ask for PRs to one of their own repos, they asked for a brand new repo to be created, and a link to that repo to be emailed to them.

Just build their competitor. Should be doable in a week or two at the level of a VC evaluation prototype.

Do you expect a tech interview by just applying?

From your perspective, you're filling out an application, maybe writing a cover letter, but on the other side, there are 100+ applications like yours. Not all of them are qualified, CVs are not a trustable source anyway.

That's why companies add tests to filter first, then interview later.

I don't expect interviews. But I also don't want to spend 20 hours working before getting a "Unfortunately we've decided not to move forward" message.

As a thumb rule, I'm happy to put 4x more effort than the company. If they interview me for 1 hour, I spend 4 hours doing the take-home. Anything more feels like exploitation.

Well, they said they receive a lot of applications so they are in the position of setting the rules.

You are absolutely right into setting your own rules as well, those haven't overlapped.

As a general rule of thumb, random series A startups are in much lower demand for top-tier talent than top-tier talent is in demand for these companies. That would mean that the good engineers should set the rules of engagement, and that any startup that thinks they set the rules is attracting worse talent.

Well, unless Qdrant writes a post complaining about the quality of their applicants, I don't see where the issue is.

Also, not all companies try to maximize for "top tier developer", it seems they are maximizing for "top motivated developer", which does not seem stupid either.

Maybe they maximize for "top gullible young inexperienced person that will fall for that"?

It sounds like they are instead maximizing for "free integrations," which seems to be a fine way to get neither free integrations nor high-quality candidates.

Thanks. We will reveal our hiring strategy in more details soon.

The general rule of thumb is that companies are free to decide what they look for and how to find it and so are candidates.

This is an open source database company, obviously the best candidates are contributors to the project first.

Picky ivy league graduate that farms leetcode and system design question is very very low in the ranking of what such companies should look for.

All the ivy league graduate leetcode farmers I know are actually the ones who would do the grunt work of developing database integrations for free if they believed a decent salary at a prestigious job might be waiting over the hill.

The people I have met with the lowest tolerance for this stuff are the ones who actually produce the most impactful work. Partly because they don't do work that has no impact on their lives.

Edit: Obviously, they can do whatever they want, but that doesn't mean that it's a good sign from outside.

"We receive a lot of applications" can be also a marketing speech and it could also mean they are flooded by spam requests from all over the world they can't filter out.

Then this job is not for you, simple as. Sounds like a win-win.

Don't be ridiculous.

HR gets paid to talk to candidates. I don't get paid to apply. The initial screening call is what allows a company to gauge the relevancy of a candidate. Let him speak about some of the topics and see how in-depth they go. Either the HR is familiar enough with the tech to understand proficiency (think a student listening to a maths professor) or they let a TL have a short conversation. I've overheard unqualified HR do their jobs badly, too; They laughed at picking them by looks and "feels". But, that's out of scope here.

A large company has millions to invest in different areas. Intrinsically, it has a much larger margin of error. You accidentally overprovisioned some resources and cost the company 10k? Tis but a scratch. You POC some personal project and accidentally get billed 10k? That is not the same.

A company can spend money on hiring. It is expected to. A private person can't spend money on applying to jobs. It isn't expected.

It's interesting to see how the shift goes from the self to the company [and to the country]. A little bit of communist propaganda goes a long way, eh, comrade NPC?

Companies not paying for their applicant's time is communist now?

> NPC

When someone calls others "npc", I understand that they are complete psychopaths that are somehow capable of thinking that the other people don't live the full human experience as they do.

This is actually kind of brilliant.

Most of the prestigious and elite indie game firms (Those that pay very well, fully remote, have a hugely successful product that can be sold for decades) basically only hire modders into their team.

Like, you had to have actively developed mods for them, for free, for years, and be famous in the community, then they'll hire you (If you want).

This works because the working conditions there are far far better than your average game company. And probably much more fun than say a bank.

What concrete companies you are talking about?

For some reason this does not seem as exploitative as most of the interview circuit elsewhere.

Over the years I've read/heard plenty of stories (here on HN and elsewhere) of people getting hired for their open source contributions to some stack that some company is using/developing.

So here I am willing to give some slack here to Qdrant. They get extremely qualified candidates who can jump right in, and candidates get told the rules of the game up front. It feels fine?

Surely much better than fake take home tests, whiteboard tests, leetcode onslaught, and 7 layers of interviews.

So if creating a high quality repo is 60-90% of your job interview that seems pretty good. As long as they are not ghosting high quality contributions that is.

I will change my view if they get 20 high quality connectors out of this and noone gets hired from that pool of candidates.

> No Pay

From this job posting [0]

> Compensated Interview Tasks: We value your time and effort; candidates will be compensated for completing interview tasks.

[0] -- https://join.com/companies/qdrant/10275180-core-rust-enginee...