If I ask you to write me a python function to convert OSGB easting/northing into WGS84 longitude/latitude the task has a very clearly defined scope. If you knock it out in a quarter of the allotted 4 hours, you've saved time. You can't use the remaining time to go further and demonstrate your mastery.
On the other hand if I ask you to write me a website for organising photos, there's no such thing as 'done' - no matter how good you are, after 4 hours you'll still be able to think of ways to make it faster, more beautiful, more featureful, more scalable, cheaper to operate, etc
Obviously, as a hiring manager I'll notice if you've spent 40 hours on the 4 hour task - but if you've spent 6 hours maybe I just think you're a fast worker with relevant experience and sharp tools. And my sense of how far you can get is calibrated by other prospective hires; if lots of people are spending 6 hours and claiming to have spent 4, my expectations will naturally be high.
For all its flaws, part of the benefit of an interview is it's time bound and equal for everyone. Similar to a test.
This isn't a college application.
The rest of this I'm not interested in. For as long as we've been talking about hiring processes on HN, there have always been staunch defenders of interviews. Lots of people have spent time getting good at them, there are classes on it, there are books, there are drilling exercises. I don't anticipate talking those people out of their investment in interviewing.
People aren't saying that. They are saying that other candidates will put in more time. If I do a professional job in four hours, then an equally talented candidate who puts in eight hours will produce a much more polished effort, and they will get the job.
I guess the fix is to ask the candidate to pick a four hour window, and to ask them to complete the task in that time.
I understand that some people are concerned that they're competing with candidates who will put in 12 hours to do what they should be doing in 4. But that's not their problem. Their problem as a professional is to evaluate whether they can do the challenge in 4 hours; that's the expectation the job is setting.
It is perfectly reasonable for someone to look at the hiring process we're running and say "no, this communicates to me that this job wouldn't be a good fit for me". That's a good outcome! Most jobs aren't a good fit for most people; that's the whole challenge of hiring.
With AI coding this is also largely useless. These “build this thing in 4 hours” assignments come with a literal prepared prompt so that they can be churned out in 10 minutes.
Again, the underlying smuggled premise here is that candidates have to finish the work sample. No they don't. In fact, that's a strong sign it's not an effective work sample. A test that everybody passes isn't a real test; it's just a hazing ritual.
So you saved yourself/the team several possible hours of interviewing, and me quite a few hours - I think it took me about 10 to 15 minutes to see what you wanted in an engineer and that I was not it, and a total of 1 email which felt quite automated (whether it was or not) so there was a very low social cost as well.
> Again, the underlying smuggled premise here is that candidates have to finish the work sample. No they don't. In fact, that's a strong sign it's not an effective work sample. A test that everybody passes isn't a real test; it's just a hazing ritual.
Now this is an interesting take. Usually when people talk about these take home assignments, they talk about assessing the quality of the work. How good is the design? How is the coding? Is it efficient/elegant/whatever?
Here you take a much different approach, saying that the completion itself is the filter. If one person completes your assignment in the allotted 2 hours and another needs 12 but never tells you that, do you not care about that discrepancy?
I'm having a real hard time seeing how this isn't strictly better than an interview, which, as the article (and basically everything written in the last year about interviews) points out, is basically a random function.