Comment by mgkimsal
10 months ago
> Nothing stops someone spending 6 hours on a "2 hour" take home test, producing a better solution than someone who followed the time limit strictly.
Unless you can ... demonstrate you only spent two hours. It's pretty rare you can do that, but... several years back I got a callback on an interview, and they forwarded me the 'coding test' portion. I got it around 1:30p, and I emailed them back the finished product around 3:45p, so.. a bit over two hours, including download and setup of their test environment.
I advanced further, but they ultimately chose someone else. I think I may have been a bit too senior/advanced for them, or.. maybe I was just a jerk in the interview, or... someone else was just a better fit? I'll never know.
I do know it was one of handful of interviews in the last 10+ years that was actually done well. On the technical side, they had a test git repo that actually worked - fork the repo, pull down, run the docker compose and everything just worked. I spoke to the woman who'd set it up and it was obvious she'd put a lot of time in to making it all as smooth as possible, and it was. I wanted to work there just because she'd put that much effort just in to 'a test'.
> maybe I was just a jerk in the interview
I will say that this is something you definitely should not be, especially if it's a larger corp. You should be political, passionate, approachable and friendly. It doesn't matter if you are more technically skilled. It might be even worse for interviewers if you are technically skilled and arrogant about it, because it would make their work lives worse. Even though I appreciate technical skill and passion, I wouldn't hire anyone who was actively arrogant or similar about it. I look to create a team that in theory would be supportive or empathetic towards low performers, although of course preferably we would find a solution to low performers or understand why they are performing low if possible, because ultimately I do want high performing team.
I certainly don't try to be... and I generally don't think I come across that way (rude, arrogant, etc) but I'm sure I've had my moments unintentionally. There's a limit to how much influence I can have on someone's perception, and I know I've said things in the past that have upset folks without meaning to, or just... knocked me out of the running for a particular technical point of view.
That you understand that another's perception can be different than yours puts you in a high tier in my book.
It's like most things can be done right - If anyone just cared to! And when I run into something done right, it's so refreshing.
But most things we interact with are done half-assedly, or are MVPs, or are deliberately made to a stupid spec, or don't prioritize the user, etc... there are a million ways to mess it up - usually by not even trying - and the result is draining.