This has not been my experience (lately). That’s how it used to be, when I was younger (and probably rated it), but every query I made in the last five years, the very first thing was a test.
In a couple of instances, it was a sensible, applicable “take-home” test, but usually, it was a schoolboy binary tree test.
I interview very well (on account of over 30 years of relevant ship experience, and I’m actually a fairly decent chap), but it has never gotten to that point.
BTW: if it isn’t already obvious, I’m quite senior, and have been architecting, as well as writing, software, since my very first project, in 1987.
I was quite willing to work for a lot less than many folks much less qualified, on account of having my retirement set, and was looking for interesting and engaging work, more than money; but it never got that far.
I won’t waste time practicing LeetCode. I don’t think it would make any difference, simply putting off the inevitable rejection. It’s not something that helps me to write better shipping code.
I recently had a lovely “take home” test, that I was supposed to finish in 2-3 hours.
If I could just build them a feedback system for their employees. Including backend, frontend (as a SPA please), and tests.
Of, of course they didn’t expect me to actually finish, 5 API’s and 3 implemented front-end pages would be ok (and tests, of course). Also, could I maybe make it look nice?
I dunno, for some reason I saw it as a challenge and actually tried. But after 3 hours I was forced to concede that even using a full framework and CRUD generation for most of the app the idea that you could finish was ludicrous.
I spent an extra 30m writing up a review of the process and attached that as a ‘cover letter’.
Unsurprisingly I didn’t get the job, but I guess I consider it a bullet dodged now.
They expect you to take 2 days on it. Ie cheat. I refuse take homes on principle at this point, as I know I’ll be working with a bunch of cheaters if I do get the job.
I had one take home at some point where the interviewers didn’t believe I actually did implement their thing in 6 hours. Everyone else took two days :/
If my experience from the other side is transferrable then no, they do not expect it to take 2 days. They actually mean what they are saying.
Unfortunately they are developers. They underestimate how long it will take. They didn't actually try it themselves. They might even have modeled it after a piece of software they did build in-house and thus underestimate even more.
I had to advocate very strongly on cutting scope from our take home test and multiple times argue against 'extensions' of the ask.
I like take home. It's a great way to talk about their code. Have them explain choices. Pros and cons. And yes tests please. What I look for is not complete test coverage or having 27 classes that all have pseudo tests. Have one class with _good_ tests. Show that you understand what is important to test and how to do that. If you know how to do that, I can hire you to repeat it for a salary.
My own last take home I sent in didn't even run because the implementation assumed various external services that I didn't bother implementing or mocking out enough to make it all run. I put lots of comments explaining various choices and what I'd expect those external services to do though. Was a great topic started about code comments and which ones I would leave in actual code and such.
I share the same experiences. Only around half of your (temporal) experience and every conversation with a recruiter ends the same way: "When can we schedule you for a technical screening? You'll probably want some time to brush up on leetcode as well".
My experience doesn't matter. The fact that I've now worked at (and currently work at) 3 of the big tech firms, doesn't matter (to be fair, I only got jobs at these places back when I was willing to grind out leetcode and memorize as many problems as I could - a task which I refuse to do today). The fact that I have a history of leading teams, areas, and spend at least 50% of my time also "writing code" for high performance, high reliability, global services, --and-- can speak in depth regarding my accomplishments, design decisions, technical decisions, collaboration, etc. doesn't matter.
The only thing that matters is: Can I pretend like I've never seen this toy leetcode problem before during an interview, and magically come up with a perfect solution in 30 minutes or less. (and if I haven't happened to memorize it, and dare legitimately appear to struggle, well... game over).
Leetcode and equivalent seems to come out of an intersection of a technical interviewer's "I don't want to take the time to interview you" and HR's "I don't know how to interview you."
Everyone knows that something very serious must be done at an interview. Nobody cares about it enough to actually put in the time or trust for a bespoke solution.
Consequently, you end up with everyone sub'ing algorithms in for due diligence, then because they made that choice, defending the choice and pretending like it's meaningful.
Hiring is hard. Hiring technical, non-standardized talent is even harder.
> I was quite willing to work for a lot less than many folks much less qualified, on account of having my retirement set, and was looking for interesting and engaging work, more than money; but it never got that far.
Did you think to work with blockchain? It has a lot of engaging problems, and you can start even without getting hired. It ranges from helping out DAOs in open-source and getting paid in tokens; to starting off your own small project and building a community.
As for the jobs, the compensations has been through the roof lately – the field doesn't get new developers nearly at the rate needed
It looks interesting, but it's not really what I like doing.
I enjoy working on stuff that people use. Things that the user interacts with directly; like UIs and devices.
I did a bunch of work with Bluetooth, OBD, and ONVIF (surveillance), but I'm working on what is sort of a "social media" app, now. I wrote the backend for one of the servers we use, and was the original author of another of the servers. These were big projects.
The interesting part, however, is the iOS app that I'm developing. Trying out different ways of presenting to the user, and interacting with the user, is a lot of fun.
In a couple of instances, it was a sensible, applicable “take-home” test, but usually, it was a schoolboy binary tree test.
I interview very well (on account of over 30 years of relevant ship experience, and I’m actually a fairly decent chap), but it has never gotten to that point.
BTW: if it isn’t already obvious, I’m quite senior, and have been architecting, as well as writing, software, since my very first project, in 1987.
I was quite willing to work for a lot less than many folks much less qualified, on account of having my retirement set, and was looking for interesting and engaging work, more than money; but it never got that far.
I won’t waste time practicing LeetCode. I don’t think it would make any difference, simply putting off the inevitable rejection. It’s not something that helps me to write better shipping code.