from Hacker News

Show HN: Coding interviews stress me out, so I built a takehome test tool

by vorador on 3/22/22, 1:50 PM with 15 comments

• by russdpale on 3/22/22, 7:23 PM

  The thing with take homes is that if I apply for 4 or 5 jobs and they all want a take home, than I am literally spending all weekend doing these things because they are NEVER just 1 to 2 hours, it's always more. One time a company wanted me build an entire website, with login, databases, everything, including their obscure stack elements that basically no one knows by heart. It was only supposed to take 2 hours.. like give me a break. I emailed them back saying I expected to be paid for this and almost attached an invoice.

  If you aren't a programmer, how do you know you are giving anything appropriate to the candidate, either technically or in a manner that respects our time?

  If you were hiring a doctor, would you send them home with a patient? If you were hiring an airplane pilot, would you send them home with a little airplane for a few hours?

  Of course not! I can't think of any single profession that has to have such an undue burden placed upon the candidate, so why are we put through this?

  Many times, I find myself wishing we could just have a registration or licensing process like other professions. I thought my degree was supposed to be for that, but I guess not.

• by vorador on 3/22/22, 1:52 PM

  Hi HN – I’m Karim, the creator of Fairlane. I built this because as a hiring manager I found out the hard way that take-home projects were way better than any other way to screen candidates.

  I know some people here are very against take-home projects but believe me, lots of candidates love them because they remove the stress of having to code live in front of a stranger (me included!).

  As a hiring manager, take-homes also let me take more chances on candidates since I didn’t have to convince one of my colleagues to give them a phone screen. The only issue with takehomes is that they’re pretty intensive logistically – there's a lot of emailing back and forth with the candidate to find an appropriate time, following up to ask for the source code, etc.

  Please let me know if you have any questions – AMA here and you can also reach out by email at karim@fairlane.io!

• by pfista on 3/22/22, 4:39 PM

  Some of my best coding interviews have been async take home projects. Plaid actually had a time-limited (2 hr) take home interview where I had access to a github repo with instructions.

  Seems like there is a lot of promise here, as Fairlane could help companies like Plaid automate this takehome process in a scalable way for candidates.

  That said, I only see this working for very early screens. Do you have plans to support later stages of the interview process?

• by johnjungles on 3/22/22, 4:17 PM

  So you send candidates a repo invite that they have a few hours to complete a task then the repo gets revoked. Pretty cool!

  The only other problem I see is to come up with enough take home problems

• by connorbrereton on 3/22/22, 5:41 PM

  This is a brilliant idea and I could see it going well beyond just coding assessments for SWE related jobs. Have you considered selling this into universities where they want to proctor programming exams/labs with integrity in mind? If so I can provide you with some prospective leads that I paid for when building (and failing to sell) a ed-tech product. Cheers!

• by jack335 on 3/23/22, 7:41 AM

  The idea is cool and I prefer take-home assignments definitely as well. Also from an employeer perspective.

  I am not sure I am understanding what your tool is doing EXACTLY but the idea is good to have a platform for that :)