I remember hearing about take-home projects that amounted to free work for a com...

hyperpape · on March 8, 2016

Empathy isn't enough, in my opinion. There are problems with most every alternative:

1. Show-off quizzes are of limited relevance.

2. Take home work is a huge stressor for people with limited amounts of outside time.

3. Open-source contributions are a) too restrictive as a filter, and b) favor people with lots of time, just like #2.

4. Personal connections narrow the pool that you have, promote nepotism, and tend to exclude people who are already at a disadvantage.

5. Looking at previous jobs screws over lots of junior people and just means you're depending on the last interviewer's shitty decision.

__jal · on March 8, 2016

Yes. I refused to do an exercise because it was quite obviously from someone's todo list, was a rather large endeavor, and didn't demand any particular skill aside from trying to find a sensible way to handle the many special cases (think parsing linux network configuration files and a pile of environment-specific behaviors).

I read it and told them (a) I had no interest in a firm that behaved that way, and (b) I had no interest in a firm that didn't understand what configuration management tools were for.

rhizome · on March 8, 2016

Empathy might be in short supply and the interviewer might simply try to replicate the gauntlet that they themselves had to run in order to get hired.