Hello $INTERVIEWER,
As you probably already know I had to cancel my interview with $COMPANY due to the take home challenge. If you haven’t yet found out, you will receive a notification from my recruiter soon.
Unfortunately I’ve had pretty poor experiences with such interviews, in the past, as well as in the present, and it’s hard for me to justify the existence of such a practice and encourage it with my participation.
My chat with you was nice, and I don’t want to give you the impression that I hate you, or that this is personal, on the contrary, I got a really good feeling about the company from you, and I honestly believe that we could have worked well together. Reason why I’m writing this to you personally, I want you and your company to succeed, and I want the people that apply to your company to have a good interview experience, otherwise I would have stayed silent.
I’ve been part of the interviewing team at my current company, for a few years now, and from personal experience and different approaches we’ve had over the years this are the things that we’ve acknowledged about the “take home” exercise:
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It takes too much time. A challenge might say “this should not take you more than 2.5 hours” or something like that but that’s never the case, there is no time limit in reality and it ends up stretching far longer, mainly because of the following point.
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There is no feedback loop. I can’t just pop in with a quick question to clarify something, or ask more information like I would on a live challenge, and the given challenge description is short on details. This means that I either make the wrong assumptions, or set my priorities to be different than what the reviewers would have. In the end if the review process goes well it’s mostly because of luck than anything else. Because of this:
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Reviewers will “bike shed” on insignificant issues on the coding challenge that are little concern in normal collaborative environment, without understanding the tradeoffs that led to such decisions. This will result in poor feedback from them and a skewed review based on their personal biases. This is less of an issue in normal code reviews as there is always a feedback loop there, but there will be none here, mostly due to time.
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The time investment is mostly on the interviewee side, which points out the interviewer values their own time more, as they don’t need to participate with the same time investment in the challenge, and it leads to devalue the free time the candidate has to sacrifice.
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Communication is important, the most important part in working with software, and the lack of communication during this type of challenge simply does not reflect the way people will interact. This is especially important for more senior roles, or if a single engineer has to “wear many hats” and gather requirements on a new product. The interview process should reflect this reality.
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It’s biased against people that do not have much free time, or have children, or need to take care of other people. I do not fit in this category myself but I do work with people that have such circumstances, we collaborate well, but if an interview process would discard them as potential workmates, given what I know about them right now, then I don’t believe that interview process has value.
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Overall, a “take home” challenge is like homework in school, and you’re not hiring school children, you’re hiring working adults. Just like homework is not an indicator of potential business value a person can bring in a company, neither is such a challenge.
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Due to it’s “homework” feeling, it’s hard to get interested in investing time into such exercise knowing it will be discarded right after, but it needs to have a unknown level of detail that requires focus and a big, continuous chunk of time, especially free time during the weekend when you’d want to relax after an exhausting week of work, or a tiring on-call shift. This ends up leaving a bad, and wrong, impression about the way the company operates.
What I suggest would be to replace the challenge with a live exercise, no more that 1.5 hours long, in which you can collaborate with the candidate in order to solve a small problem that highlights their way of thinking. Designing such an exercise is up to you, as you can define your priorities better, but just know we’ve managed to do it at my current company, and many other have before you, so you can find samples online if you really want to get some inspiration.
I hope you will not ignore this feedback and discuss it seriously with the rest of your team, and of course, if you restructure your interview process let me know, I’d be happy to apply again.
Thank you,
$NAME