I'm sorry to hear that. This is of course not normal, could you please let me know where you sent it? We look at all applicants' tests sent via our job page, and if yours got lost then it's an error that I'd be happy to fix.
We accept any kind of code, be it a kata made during a workshop or a side project... really we just want to talk about code that the candidate wrote previously. It doesn't need to be large to have interesting tradeoffs made
Why? You already gave the candidate a "take home assignment". That assignment should involve interesting trade-offs. If it doesn't, tweak it until it does. Why not discuss that code?
I'm the kind of guy who still likes to code on the side, at home, for fun, after all these years, but I'm also aware that not everyone is like that. Maybe that's one of your filters -- maybe you're looking for people who prefer coding to be 90% of their lives -- but that would be a big red flag in my book. I've seen too many companies who think that they are entitled to employees who will give them everything for next-to-nothing in return.
Sometimes we do discuss this code if the candidate prefers. But it's still a somewhat "fake" code made for the only purpose to apply at the company. Most people would find it more interesting to discuss code they spent weeks on.
Finally we are not looking for any specific profile, but so far almost every person found a piece of code to share from their career. We don't get thousands of applicants, so maybe we're not seeing the issue just yet. If it turns out to be a problem, we'll change the process :)
>"We accept any kind of code, be it a kata made during a workshop or a side project"
>"But it's still a somewhat "fake" code made for the only purpose to apply at the company"
The code I write for side projects is not "production quality" because I do it for my own entertainment. I would never feel comfortable showing it off in an interview because it doesn't represent me professionally. All of my positions have been strictly closed-source.
Additionally, the code I write for side projects is usually unlike the work I'd be doing professionally. I'm a web developer but most of the side projects I work on are either dinky little video games or open source hardware.
I'll cede that I do find my side projects more interesting to talk about but I generally try and write "high-ish quality code" (not "fake") for the take home interview projects that I've had to do.
As I mentioned in the article, we don't expect the code presented to be "perfect" code. If you've managed to get a side project running very quickly thanks to tradeoffs you've made, it's also interesting. It's really just a way to have a place to discuss choices.
That ignores the class of FOSS people I like to call the "fixers", the ones that will spelunk a code base because they have a problem, find the 10 line fix that fixes their issue and never come back to the project again. Those 10 lines were probably very useful but doesn't show any larger design ability, despite that being a thing the candidate may be very good at, or large enough to garner a gauge on how that person sees code. Also consider the people who have never contributed to open source because they leave their work at the door. This is all your prerogative on how you want to run this, but I was personally put off reading that section, despite having a good idea what you're looking for. out of it
Yes it's true that it doesn't fit all use cases. However I would see looking at a few of the fixes you're talking about as an interesting technical interview.
If you sum it all up, it is less than a day. The phone screening is ~20 minutes, the assignment takes a couple of hours and so on.
I think it's fair to expect that a candidate is willing to invest at least 5-6 hours in an interview process. Compared to what I've seen before (full day interviews, freelance period etc) this seems fair to me. But like you comment proves, it might not be for everybody.
A take home assignment alone is likely more than a work day, if not multiples - I'll take a 7 hour onsite interview gauntlet over that any day.
The only side this process seems to be favorable for is the company interviewing.
To give a flip side, I just finished interviewing with over 10 companies in a rigorous search. Of those, two did take home tests, and ultimately I didn't have the time to complete either, especially since the requirements were written in a way where candidates were encouraged to dump a lot of time into them. My schedule was filled with many high stakes interviews, which was mentally exhausting. It simply is not in my interest to do a take home project, as it reduces the number of companies I can simultaneously interview at.
From experience we saw that for most people doing the coding test was only taking ~an evening which seems reasonable as it removes the need for more on site discussions.
I guess that it's true that the take home assignment is not optimal if you interviews with more than 10 companies and in this case we must be loosing some candidates.
They lie. Most candidates will tell you the coding exercise took less than it actually did because
1) they want to appear efficient
2) you said it would take only 3 hours so if they say it took 8 hours it would look like a failure
Source: me, last week, for another company.
Plus, programming is not just writing code, most technical interviewers will want to see the global design, unit tests, comments, etc... Which are not accounted for in the expected time
If this is the case, you are merely writing a piece of "our interview process is entirely average." I don't know about you, but 5-6 hours is standard. What's the point of breaking out your day-of process into 4 bullet points if its just the same as your normal engineering interview? Fluff.
Finally, realize that your candidates (just like your Eng org) spend much more time prepping for your interview than you quantify on paper. However much they choose to is up to them, but don't pretend you're doing them a favor.
I never said our interview process was perfect, I mainly wanted to share it because I saw a lot of people complaining about whiteboard coding and so on... so I figured it could be interesting to some to see a less exhausting alternative.
Just a small observation: whiteboard coding is not inherently wrong. Bad experiences with whiteboard coding usually come from dealing with companies with broken hiring process, where simply eliminating whiteboard coding and replacing it with something else wouldn't help.
I don't think that there much one can learn by looking at a couple of classes. On our end we let the candidate decide based on their previous company's policies.
Yes, some people prefer not to share this and it is totally fine by us. It's really up to the candidate to decide in accordance to the previous company's policies.
Personally I wouldn't mind if a previous employee would like to demonstrate his/her work using the codebase - as long as they're not applying to a competing firm :) We also have a lot of people that created their own companies or interesting side projects that will present this.
We are building the leading peer to peer car rental platform and are hiring across the board. We believe shared cars are a better way to move around, offering more flexibility and more convenience.
We're hiring Frontend, Backend, Fullstack, iOS and Android developers. Our stack is mainly Ruby based, but we you can it learn on the job if you already know another OO language. For Android and iOS we use Java and Swift.
Our goal is to replace car ownership by a better service: shared cars available at every corner will offer the flexibility and proximity of ownership without the burden of maintenance. We already have a significant traction and rank #1 worldwide on the market of peer-to-peer car rental, but we believe the adoption should be 100 times larger in just a few years.
We're currently looking for Backend, Android and Fullstack engineers to join our tech team in Paris. Positions are detailed here: https://en.drivy.com/jobs
If it sounds like something interesting to you, please contact me directly via marc+jobs@drivy.com
_Please note that the position is in Paris, France. We might consider remote work in the future, but we are not ready to accept it just yet._
We are building the leading peer to peer car rental service. Our goal is to replace car ownership by a better service: shared cars available at every corner offering the flexibility and proximity of ownership without the burden of maintenance. We already have a significant traction and rank #1 worldwide on the market of peer-to-peer car rental, but we believe the adoption should be 100 times larger in just a few years.
We're looking for a senior developer to join our team and help us on subjects such as:
- Improving our search algorithm (matching supply and demand) to improve our search-to-book conversion
- Scaling our payments infrastructure
- Designing and implementing new API endpoints for our native apps (iPhone/Android)
- Detecting and preventing fraud
- Monitoring and scaling our platform and tools
- Implementing new features for our end users to enjoy
We build the service using mostly Ruby on Rails. We care a lot about maintaining a good code quality, testing coverage and shipping everything continuously.
Mail: marc at drivy dot com