by vvoruganti on 7/31/24, 4:04 PM with 10 comments
I've also heard horror stories with take home projects that require multiple days of work, generally unpaid, and in the least charitable scenarios feel exploitative and like the company is just getting free labor.
So I was wondering what are alternatives that actually work? Some interesting examples I've encountered over the years include:
- Praetorian's Tech Challenges - https://www.praetorian.com/challenges/
- Fly.io's Gossip Glomers - https://fly.io/dist-sys/
by muzani on 7/31/24, 10:09 PM
Start with icebreaker questions, what kind of games do you like and why? Go into slightly harder questions - a common request is adding seeds to plants in Rimworld, yes or no?
Then go into the hard technical question - how would you know which part on the screen the caravan should stop at? How would you determine where civilization is on a map? The smart answer is akin to a Monte Carlo simulation, first time I learned of it. Just throw darts (aka sample random points) on the map, give it some civilization rating, then triangulate from there. There's a further optimization where you can search around doors.
It's great because these questions are directly related to the work itself, and you can make a good judgement of someone's abilities in a few hours without needing several sessions of interviews.
For something like banking, I'd ask 1) How do you send a PIN securely from an app? 2) Ok, but how do you do biometrics when the API requires a PIN login? 3) Now let's say we allow users to KYC from an app. How do you detect that someone isn't AI generating their images? You can force users to only send images taken through the app, but an attacker will be able to spoof the app and directly send their image to the API bypassing the app.
by yao420 on 7/31/24, 5:17 PM
Only bad experience with that was patreons ctf, the containers didn’t work so I spent the hour interview trying to get it to run. Horrible experience.
by francisofascii on 7/31/24, 4:41 PM
by id00 on 7/31/24, 5:29 PM
by drdrey on 8/1/24, 11:05 PM