Ask HN: Is it now common to ask for “full” applications as part of interviewing?

It&#x27;s not yet ubiquitous, but it isn&#x27;t uncommon either.<p>I had application go through such a coding test in lieu of a &quot;biased interview process&quot;, but wouldn&#x27;t pay. They also had integration with two third party services, and for a Go programming position they also wanted a REST interface implemented on RoR.<p>It&#x27;s a great test for &quot;passion&quot;, however; if your definition of &quot;passion&quot; is &quot;unpaid overtime&quot;.

I&#x27;ve stopped interviewing with companies that do this.<p>Take home interview &quot;challenges&quot; take up a lot of time and resources. Most of the ones I&#x27;ve gotten have been prototypes&#x2F;MVP type deals.<p>+ You&#x27;re asking me to spend almost a week of my time, for free<p>+ I have similar examples on my Github<p>+ I&#x27;m not usually allowed to share the solution<p>Sorry, but if you can&#x27;t look at my significant github profile and figure out if I can code or not, then we probably aren&#x27;t a good match. I&#x27;m not going to work for free because you&#x27;re bad at interviewing.<p>To put this another way, flip the question. Would you give me your product for free for a week? (Probably not...)<p>That being said, I think paying for the interview is probably acceptable.

This sounds like a good startup idea: A certification agency where they put you through the works, measuring your ability to write code, solve various challenges, complete complex projects, etc. Then they can issue a certificate to those that pass their examinations.<p>Maybe in addition, they can offer training in various topics, include periodic assignments during those training periods, then have several days of monster examinations at the end of it. After which, you then finally get this certification. Of course, if this is done properly, it may take about 4 - 6 years of full time work to get through all the training and examination sessions.

My frustration with this type of interview is that their costs are entirely asymmetric. The company puts together a set of requirements once, and then forces every applicant to spend 5-10 generally unpaid hours completing it. If that were the bulk of the interview and the only further step was coming into the office for a couple of softball &quot;culture fit&quot; interviews it would be acceptable, but from what I&#x27;ve been told if you do great on the sample application you&#x27;re just rewarded with a full day of technical interviews anyway.<p>This biases the companies towards their sample application at everybody in their funnel, even if they have far too many applicants, are not that motivated to fill the position, or potentially if they don&#x27;t actually have an open position at all! This wastes a great deal of candidates&#x27; time without any real chance of an offer.

My experience lately has been that yes &quot;full&quot; is expected even though its not specified as such.<p>What I mean is some recruiter will say &quot;we would like you to complete a coding challenge it shouldn&#x27;t take any more than 2 hours to complete.&#x27; Then the feed back will come back that &quot;the team was disappointed that you didn&#x27;t implement features x, y and z.&quot;<p>The whole homework&#x2F;project&#x2F;coding challenge requirement has really become disrespectful in my opinion. Extremely vague requirements, arbitrary or unrealistic time constraints and then you are judged but not allowed to participate in any discussion about the code you produced.<p>And perhaps the height of absurdity is recruiters asking via email if you will complete a coding assignment. This is even before speaking to a human being to see if there might even be a fit.<p>The hiring process just seems to be becoming more broken all the time. Just refuse and say &quot;No.&quot;<p>I think companies might really benefit from smoke testing their own hiring process in some blind fashion.

It&#x27;s been a while since I last interviewed, but I&#x27;ve wanted something like this for interviewing applicants at my own workplace. It strikes me as fairer to all parties, especially compared to whiteboard coding exercises.<p>I&#x27;ve heard of some companies doing exactly what you suggest - paying an appropriate amount to cover the few hours spent on the interview project.<p>I get that some will criticise this saying it takes up your free time, but I&#x27;d argue the common practice of memorising algorithm solutions for interviews is often an equally unproductive use of the interviewee&#x27;s own time.

There is unfortunately a fairly high probability that a given interview candidate for a coding job can&#x27;t actually code (at all, not just poorly or slowly). So hiring people try to come up with processes and tests to avoid being the idiot who hired someone who couldn&#x27;t code.<p>Obviously requesting that the candidate actually produce new code is a fairly good way to ensure success in this goal.<p>otoh it is likely to irritate and inconvenience the candidate and probably remove some proportion of the better applications from the pool.<p>I prefer to ask candidates to talk about a project they found interesting or challenging or noteworthy, and go from there asking questions, specifically what was their individual contribution and so on.<p>Personal references are also useful.<p>Ultimately I suppose though if I had no available candidates where I could get a first-hand trusted reference, nor any recent project to discuss, about the only option I&#x27;d have left would be to ask them to write code. I don&#x27;t recall it ever coming to that though.<p>Faced with this situation you could try suggesting that you prefer not to spend significant time working on an apprentice-piece project and would the interviewer accept your hobby project instead or some recent work project if disclosure restrictions allow you to talk about it and show code.

I spent a weekend working on one of these interview projects only to find the company didn&#x27;t like the Apple libraries I selected to use. They needed someone with very specific knowledge but failed to list that as part of the project requirements. The result? No job offer, my time wasted and I have a very poor opinion of both the company and recruiter to this day. if you&#x27;re going to do an interview project, make sure you ask lots of questions up front before investing your time.

This seems over the top. It reminds me of the graphic design work companies often ask of graphic designers. Extremely specific work that could easily be reused by the company, obtained, essentially, for free.

These tests infuriate me. I was given one once, thought I did well, received feedback from the recruiter that the employer &quot;was unimpressed&quot;. I pressed for details (I did spend something like 2 hours on it after all!) and received none.<p>Struck me as extremely rude.

Take home projects strike me as an overcorrection for the perceived problems with whiteboard interviews. Drawing from a recent sample of interviews, companies that ask for them still seem to be in the minority.<p>I hope this remains the case, as 1) they are an enormous time suck for the applicant, and 2) demonstrate abilities that a qualified applicant could become proficient at quickly. Qualification for a position requiring these abilities can be assessed in a way that is not so one-sided against the applicant.<p>Related: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;alwaystrending.io&#x2F;articles&#x2F;tech-interview-torture-chamber#takehome" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;alwaystrending.io&#x2F;articles&#x2F;tech-interview-torture-ch...</a>

This is why I oftentimes dislike take home projects for interviews - they&#x27;re extremely time consuming, or are biased towards those who can cobble things together quickly. I can do that too, but it&#x27;s not without stress or time spent, and I know I would be competing against others probably willing to sink more time.

There was some discussion of this recently on r&#x2F;cscareerquestions [0]. The general consensus there was this is too much, though a few people had seen it. Myself, I would have to really <i>really</i> love the company to consider doing it.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;cscareerquestions&#x2F;comments&#x2F;6bvmpf&#x2F;are_technical_tests_like_this_one_common_or_just&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;cscareerquestions&#x2F;comments&#x2F;6bvmpf&#x2F;a...</a>

Companies use these to save time. Interviews take hours of time for multiple people. They are also soul-crushing for the interviewers to be forced to sit while watching people flounder at the whiteboard. At several companies I have been with, they had a basic 20 question skills test. It was enough to cut the number of time-wasting interviews massively. I assume that the &quot;Full application&quot; process is there for a similar reason. It shows them up front that you know the basics, or know how to Google the basics. At every company I have worked at that had a pre-test or code submission application, people who submitted the test&#x2F;sample would have an enormous leg up. With interviews it was like 10-20:1 interview:hire ratio. With the test&#x2F;sample it was more like 3:1. It is a massive time&#x2F;effort saving filter on the company&#x27;s part.<p>Companies are NOT trying to get free work out of you. If they wanted to hook to a third-party API, it would be easier to use the API sample code. They are trying to save themselves hundreds of dollars in staff salaries and lost productivity, to interview a person who can&#x27;t function in a realistic programming environment.<p>These are EXACTLY the sort of companies you should apply to if you really want a job.

Yup, it&#x27;s become common enough, sadly.<p>And the fun part is that it&#x27;s more than common (i.e. it happens at least 50% of the time) that they <i>significantly</i> botch either (or both!) of the written work scope, or the platform configuration &#x2F; test data -- or simply don&#x27;t budget (quite) enough time to get the thing done, given the ambiguities -- such that you, in turn, either: (1) burn significantly more time, energy and adrenaline to slap something halfway reasonable together on their insane timelines (knowing full well that it would never be up the quality standards either of you would prefer for an actual, real business project); or (2) find out at the end that you just can&#x27;t deliver (because what they wanted was physically or logically impossible to begin with.<p>And if you happen &quot;fail&quot; because of (1) or (2) well then.. so be it. I mean, you&#x27;d think they could have simply dogfooded these assignments on their own people first, before asking strangers to, in effect, dogfood these project descriptions for them (on their presumably worthless time). But if you think about it from their perspective, the second option (using the first few candidates as free dogfooding labor!) is obviously much more attractive.<p>In theory, these projects <i>can</i> work as intended -- if designed properly. The problem is that (being human beings) the people who come up with these &quot;tests&quot; tend to greatly overestimate their ability to do that. And if they burn out &#x2F; egregiously annoy a few candidates in the process -- leaving them with a permanently negative view of their company (or at least the hiring manager that sent them on that wild goose chase) -- well &quot;so be it&quot;.

Yeah, I&#x27;ve seen these. I had one that involved essentially creating a front end app to retrieve data from a 3rd party api, parse the data, and display it on an html page with interactive controls to let the user filter the data.<p>So, an HTML&#x2F;CSS&#x2F;Javascript test proving that you know how to make an api request, play with data, and set up event handlers.<p>Which is fine, I suppose, except it was with a 2 hour limit and you had to code everything via a web interface (hackerrank maybe?).<p>I found it super annoying to work outside of my editing environment without any of the linting tools that I&#x27;m use to working with and without even source control to record good commits to jump back to if things went wrong.<p>The task itself was not particularly hard, but I had to work very fast, didn&#x27;t finish the last filtering options, and had no time for design -- everything was default html with a few primary colors thrown in here and there.<p>I don&#x27;t mind a time-limited coding challenge, but not letting me use the tools I use every single time I code (and would use if I were hired to work there) was very frustrating.

As some other commenters mention, and I feel the same way: if a company asks you to do this, they&#x27;re asking for too much and I think it&#x27;s fair to tell them that that is an unacceptable amount of work for an interview. I can kind of see this as fair only if you are going in as a more experienced dev but with no work examples, but in that case, it&#x27;s simple enough to contact references to verify previous work and positions. The only reason I would do this during an interview is if they paid me for my time, essentially treating me as a contractor for some period of time, and the time frame was large enough if I was currently working. If a company asked for this without offering to pay, I would decline the interview.<p>One additional thing to consider is that if you do work like this for an interview, you should explicitly request to keep the copyright to the work in case they don&#x27;t give you the job, so you can showcase to other prospective employers. A simple way to do this would be to request them to review it on Github or Gitlab.

I once designed a fairly simple code test as part of interviewing, requesting that the code in question be added to a public github repository. The code in question needed to be in node&#x2F;javascript, read an xml file as a stream, and output a json file (newline separated json)... I then did the challenge myself, it took a couple hours.<p>To me, it represented enough of a system that I could see how a problem was broken up. I also wanted to see some insight as to using npm, determining a package(s) to use and then that they used streaming not read it all into memory... as this can cause issues with really big files.<p>Only 3 people actually returned any code, and only 1 half worked. Amazing how many people will label themselves &quot;expert&quot; and can&#x27;t figure out how to read in a file, as a stream or otherwise.<p>---<p>Edit: Additionally, we were not trying to outsource interview work, but the task itself was something we were doing similar things with as we were actively migrating to a new database, and there was a lot of conversion tasks underway in support of this.

This trend is a bit over the top, but I can see why it came about. Other industries have a way of evaluating talent. Artists can usually point at their artwork. Some developers have taken to using Github as a public forum for their work. How do we evaluate engineers in a consistent fashion?<p>In an effort to open a few minds to new possibilities, I wrote a medium piece (picked up by HackerNoon) around my experiences with hiring software engineers in San Francisco (you can find it if you look at my profile here). We tried to rethink the process and use pair programming to help reduce interview stress, properly evaluate candidates and make a generally more enjoyable experience.<p>At the end of the day, it is hard enough to hire good people in a competitive market. Making candidates jump through hoops seems like it only creates more frustration. Do you really want someone&#x27;s first opinion of your company to be less than positive?

Ask an endless series of questions about algorithms and&#x2F;or expect extensive whiteboard coding -&gt; developers complain about these not reflecting the real world.<p>Ask a developer to write some actual code to prove that they can do the job they&#x27;re being hired to do -&gt; developers complain about having to demonstrate that they can do the job they&#x27;re about to be hired to do.<p>There&#x27;s a legitimate question here about how extensive of a project is necessary to demonstrate that you can, in fact, write code effectively. But this is basically what we&#x27;ve been clamoring for for years, companies abandoning pressure cooker interview room gotcha-questions on whiteboards.<p>The work sample test is one of the most effective ways of evaluating a candidate&#x27;s fitness. What do you expect an prospective employer to do to determine if you can do the job, if not write some code?

Is it more common? Probably. But you know what&#x27;s also more common? Companies asking for such work and then turning around and saying &quot;sorry, we don&#x27;t have time to even look at your work.&quot;<p>Fuck these companies that ask for shit like that. Since we can&#x27;t even hold them to the most basic standards of decency, fuck them and fuck their interview process. Seriously, there&#x27;s no nice way to put this. Either pay for such work or fuck off. So in other words, pay or only fools will apply. (Yes, I have been a fool myself in the past.)

There&#x27;s a big caveat to this story in that I already had another offer I was considering, but I walked out of an onsite where they wanted me to do something similar, but on top of a skeleton project in an IDE running on their own laptop that they provided. But then, after sitting there for a full hour watching their dev try to figure out why the environment wasn&#x27;t reset properly after the last candidate, and not being willing to have it run late and cause my flight home to be at risk... I decided to just leave.

It is ubiquitous, but we normally do a slightly different thing:<p>* The thing you do is a very narrow fix &#x2F; feature * ...on our open-source library, so you get the credit and visibility * ...with a very defined scope * ...which will usually force you to Google&#x2F;SO search quite a bit.<p>Since we are not remote, for way-overseas candidates it&#x27;s pretty much the only thing we could do. We use it to assess fizzbuzz as well as style and the ability to contribute to an existing project, as well as communication and accepting&#x2F;giving critique.<p>It&#x27;s not very easy to establish - the company needs to have open-source presence in the first place. It&#x27;s certainly harder than just having someone do a throwaway full-stack app. But for us it did work very well. The best filter was not even people doing something &quot;not well enough&quot; but people just agreeing to take the assignment and then disappearing.

I don&#x27;t mind to do any code test a company requires, but I expect the same commitment on their side. They are looking for candidates and don&#x27;t want to waste time, but if I am looking for companies I don&#x27;t want to waste time either.<p>Usually they ask for a test to asses my skills, but if I am already in the industry I have similar projects I did in my free time that we can use to discuss. I dislike to repeat the same test other candidates have already done if there isn&#x27;t a good reason. Asses my skill by fulfilling your expectations with your test is not the way go in my opinion. If you are looking for talent to bring new skills to your team, definitely you cannot get them if you are looking for the skills you know. It is better to have an open conversation about something the candidate has done that have some impact.

When I interviewed with Toptal, once I made it through the preliminary screenings, the final test was to build a simple web application over the course of 2-3 days in a language of my choice, and commit the code to their git repository, and demo it live.<p>I finished it in a day and a half; decided to use Meteor since I never used it before and figured it&#x27;d be a good time to dabble in it.<p>It was by far the most enjoyable part of the application process. And I think its the best indication of a developer&#x27;s ability. Real-word application of the knowledge that you will probably be using 90% of the time (as opposed to theory and logic puzzles).

I&#x27;ve never seen this. I would also simply ask if there were an alternative interview process. If not, I&#x27;d politely decline to continue. This sort of interview seems like it&#x27;s better than algorithm bingo on the whiteboard. In reality it&#x27;s either an attempt to get free (or discounted) work or else contrived and therefore still removed enough from the actual day-to-day of the job as to be less than useful as a measure of fit and ability.

I have not seen this while interviewing in the Northeast US.

I personally think these types of coding projects are way more effective at determining skills than whiteboard or fizzbuzz type stuff. It also opens up opportunities for you to discuss the solutions you used with the hiring manager.<p>Now if they are requiring you to spend more than 2 to 4 hours on a project, that is unacceptable imo unless the hiring company is willing to pay contract rates for the time.

I don&#x27;t mind this (provided the request is decently specified and scoped), because I find interviews stressful and often pointless and work sample tests are (or should be) higher signal, but if I&#x27;m going to do a work sample test, I don&#x27;t want to then have several phone or onsite interviews as a followup.<p>Ideally, when I&#x27;m given such a test I should be able to predict my success at completing it well enough to know whether it is worth my time. There could, of course, be unforeseen problems, but I should be able to judge the likelihood that spending the time to complete the exercise will get me the job. This means that cultural expectations are expressed up front. Do you expect the job applicant to adhere to your company code style guide or expect unit tests? I&#x27;d assume the latter is a frequent expectation but it doesn&#x27;t hurt to mention; practices vary greatly from company to company so a reminder could be useful. Or maybe you write a lot of functional JavaScript on your team, and want to know if a candidate is familiar with that style. If you reject a candidate because they didn&#x27;t match your preferred style but didn&#x27;t ask for that, you&#x27;re likely wasting my time and yours.

3 years ago, when I was hiring college-level hacker kids we would just ask the to hack out a web app (with or without our API). This was when dev boot camps were taking off and asking them to just build something was actually a much better understanding of them than white board tests.

I applied at a company that I assumed had at least 40+ people (assuming normal turnover) because of the frequency of job postings. Turned out they had 4 employees. And they wanted me to create a full application before I was given a second interview. Nah.

It&#x27;s been my experience - at least when it comes to remote positions and the ones posted on HN&#x27;s Hiring threads and all the remote boards.

I don&#x27;t have that much experience but for what it&#x27;s worth I have not heard of or seen that. That seems a bit bizarre to me.

They want free work. Simple as that.

I think there&#x27;s been enough rancor about whiteboard interviews that people are looking for a better way. I personally was never very good at on-the-spot whiteboarding even though I&#x27;m decent at building stuff, so my company&#x27;s interview process incorporates a take-home coding challenge. It&#x27;s not as in depth as deploying an app but it tends to take a couple hours.<p>I can&#x27;t imagine paying someone to interview though. Both parties are spending time (and money) on the interview already and if you don&#x27;t want the job enough to put in a day getting it, to me that&#x27;s a signal that you wouldn&#x27;t be very interested in the problems we&#x27;re working on.<p>I do sympathize though and agree that interviews still suck (for both sides).