It’s hard to find those places because they’re usually small companies outside the valley without name recognition.
I work for one of those places and am the lead technical interviewer (no “a” lead, “the” lead, that’s how small we are).
We do have a very easy take home code challenge that’s very related to the kind of work we do. But we only specify the language to use because that’s what 99% of our code is written in. We don’t care anything else about structure of the project and you do it on your own time (it’s really only an hour or two of work - or at least it should be)
I’m not sure of the rate of people returning the challenge to us (I hear that it’s a bit less than 50%). I interview all of the folks who return code. And pass about 2/3 of those on to the full day interview. (No-pass is usually code that doesn’t compile or gets the wrong answer on the test case that we provide - we give them the correct answer for the test case, so they know what they’re aiming for). And we hire a pretty high percentage of the folks who do the full day. Granted, we’re in a bit of a niche field and we don’t have big-tech name recognition so we don’t have the volume of applicants that other places have to deal with.
I always try to be respectful in the interview and we only talk big picture stuff. There are no quizzes or gotcha questions, we talk about the code and just have a conversation. I hope that everyone who leaves my interview feels respected and like their time wasn’t wasted. Sometimes I include one of my junior engineers on the technical interview so they get experience with it. Usually they start off peppering questions and trying to be smart, but I just set a good example and they calm down quickly and realize it’s about a conversation and seeing if the candidate would like the kind of work we do.
I can’t think of any bad hire we’ve make in my years of doing it this way.
I work for one of those places and am the lead technical interviewer (no “a” lead, “the” lead, that’s how small we are).
We do have a very easy take home code challenge that’s very related to the kind of work we do. But we only specify the language to use because that’s what 99% of our code is written in. We don’t care anything else about structure of the project and you do it on your own time (it’s really only an hour or two of work - or at least it should be)
I’m not sure of the rate of people returning the challenge to us (I hear that it’s a bit less than 50%). I interview all of the folks who return code. And pass about 2/3 of those on to the full day interview. (No-pass is usually code that doesn’t compile or gets the wrong answer on the test case that we provide - we give them the correct answer for the test case, so they know what they’re aiming for). And we hire a pretty high percentage of the folks who do the full day. Granted, we’re in a bit of a niche field and we don’t have big-tech name recognition so we don’t have the volume of applicants that other places have to deal with.
I always try to be respectful in the interview and we only talk big picture stuff. There are no quizzes or gotcha questions, we talk about the code and just have a conversation. I hope that everyone who leaves my interview feels respected and like their time wasn’t wasted. Sometimes I include one of my junior engineers on the technical interview so they get experience with it. Usually they start off peppering questions and trying to be smart, but I just set a good example and they calm down quickly and realize it’s about a conversation and seeing if the candidate would like the kind of work we do.
I can’t think of any bad hire we’ve make in my years of doing it this way.