Comment by maxsilver

10 months ago

> It seems take homes are mainly geared towards pre-selecting young single people with a lot of free time to code on the side besides their main job and other responsibilities, or who have no other responsibilities. (snip) I question the future of my career in tech, how will I be able to compete for new jobs later when I won't be, and take homes will be normalized?

My counterpoint to this is that takehome tests are great for folks who don't necessarily do well on brainteasers, but are otherwise strong functional developers. Despite having a family and children, I always prefer a takehome assessment. (And, just as an FYI, I'm 36 and a single parent to a young grade-schooler)

I might be biased, in that I feel like I do poorly in the live programming / brainteaser style interviews, but do strongly when I have a takehome assessment. Live programming is like a completely bizzaro-land version of programming, where a real person is staring you down while you type, observing your every interaction, and deciding your fate based on a random 60 minutes of the highest-stress part of your day. ("Oh, you googled a for loop syntax, you are clearly an idiot lying about your experience" when in fact, it's more like, "I get thrown 6 different programming languages every single week, each with similar but slightly varied syntax for every single thing, and having a person stare at me and decide the entire future of my career is a little bit stressful and anxiety-inducing").

With a takehome assessment, I can think about it for a while, I can write it all upfront, I can try a few different implementations and pick the one that feels best, I can accurately and intelligently explain exactly what I did and why I did it, I can talk in detail about the problem and potential tradeoffs. I can wrap the whole thing in nice automated testing, I can setup basic CI/CD for it on GitHub Actions or equivalent. I can demo my commitment to strong well-written clear documentation and dev experience, right in my branch Pull Request -- and all of that will likely be a closer match to what real-world day-to-day work at the new company might be like, than solving your LeetCode brainteaser.

I don't love "unpaid work before getting a job", yes that part sucks. But it sucks less than having a random stranger decide your an idiot, based on watching you sweat for an hour. Even if I'm going to get ultimately rejected anyway, the takehome route still feels better.

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maxsilver

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bee_rider  10 months ago

How’s your career going?

I’m often worried that I’ll look like a dummy when I have to look up basic loop syntax. I’m not dumb, and I’m somewhat experienced… I just write code in Python, Matlab, Fortran, Bash, whatever else. It is shocking that the basic shape of syntax can be so different!

And also the degree to which it doesn’t actually matter. It’s just when starting a new file. My brain needs a little bit of syntax around to get locked into the language I think.

  • vundercind  10 months ago

    I have been paid to write code for over 20 years, in eight or nine languages, and wouldn’t bet a serious amount of money I could fizz-buzz in any of them, including one I wrote a bunch of today, without a reference. Not without getting something basic about the language wrong in a way that would keep it from working on the first try.

    This is, if anything, becoming more true the longer I do this sort of work.

  • williamcotton  10 months ago

    My brain refuses to learn bash conditional syntax. Personally, when I’m about to write a conditional in bash I take it as a cue to switch to another language.

    • bee_rider  10 months ago 

          for i in $( ls | grep “a complicated enough filter that I never have to use conditionals in my loop”) ;
    do
         echo -n “if I don’t want to work on ” $i 
        echo “ it is time to change languages” 
    done