Thoughts on interview that requires us to build a project

If it's a small project (1-2 hours) kind of thing im all for it vs never ending interviews and leetcode tests.

There's a deeper and more accurate understanding of how the dev does things when the pressure is removed.

When I say small project, think basic CRUD api and UI.

If it's about "should I do it when applying for job" — it tends to be the least awful option. Of course, depending on assignment size.

If it's about the other side of the table, about "I want to check potential new hires", I prefer inviting them for a technical refinement instead. It's the only interview round I usually do.

I just pick a nasty technical task from the backlog, get the prospect into the tech refinement team meeting (which usually takes 45m), get some snacks & drinks, and ask them in a casual setting to help brainstorm how we could solve the issue.

No whiteboard code, no git branches, no test grading — I just want to get a feel for their thought process, whether it's "maybe we should ask the PM whether the requirements can be simplified" or "Let's cache everything using technology x" or "We should probably check for database queries inside of loops" or "Is there an application performance management system we can check?".

For me, if its a bit of data processing and coding, fine. I've withdrawn from an interview with one of the modern banking apps because they were like "this should only take about a day". The terms were like, "we own any ideas you implement even if we don't hire you". The problem was fraud detection.

@atheist you detected a fraud.

@Rename 😂Nice, yes.

@atheist reply with "oh you want a brainstorming session with a consultant for a day, that'll be 10 grand." :-p

@ArcaneEye Of course there should be a limit, it shouldn't be serious productive work.

The only purpose of a "demo project" is to show that you know how to write, structure and commit code, it shouldn't be larger than a to-do app.

But that's why I think both demo/portfolio apps and whiteboard interviewing are a bit of a waste of time. It doesn't reliably show the difference between a junior and senior.

That's why I ask interview prospects to join a technical refinement, where they can read OUR code and bitch about it, instead of doing any code writing.

All company production code contains ugly legacy hacks and badly performing classes. How an interviewee picks up on flaws and communicates about it in a 30-45m meeting tells me more about their skills than any interview question would. It reveals both their soft & hard skills.

Add some pizza & drinks/beers... at that point, if I was the one being interviewed, I wouldn't feel like I wasted time even if I didn't get hired.

@ArcaneEye And actually, it's how I hired one of our product managers.

Applied for a position as senior backend developer. Coding level: Junior, at best. Motivation, communication & organizational skills: Superhuman.

He kept asking about requirements, how it would affect UX if we would simplify certain features, how often the feature was used, whether we had done qualitative research on the feature, how often we had to fix bugs for it, etc.

🤷‍♀️

Are they paying you to do the little project? If not it sounds like a waste of time otherwise link them to your git.

@bittersweet if you're hiring in Denmark I'll stop by for pizza any time :-p

And i agree, something like that is fine, but i recently spent some time researching web frontend because the demo project should be a site with functioning api's. Spent a good three days since I was unemployed at the time anyway, aaaand got burned. Turned out they had some issues with the one in charge of recruiting and I've since received a formal apology from the CEO, but it made me very sceptical about doing any kind of 'homework' for recruitment processes.

I'm very happy with where i ended up, so it's all good in the end, but i do consider myself the wiser after it.

Spent some time interviewing for full remote works, and loved two companies that did 2 days and 1 week, paid work as "final tech validation".

So for each, you had to do some project/stuff production-ready BUT they did pay me a pretty good daily rate (around 800E)...
And I was using their software factory (including a good dev platform)

Loved it. Trying to see how the fuck I can implement it in my company. My team also loved the idea.

If they pay the time it takes to build such project...
Or if you really really want thy job, it's OK.
If they want you to make a project for free on your own time run away, 90% change you will be working overtime with no pay daily

I've come to the conclusion I want to genghis khan you all.

it came to me as I was thinking about how many of your ruined offspring and siblings I've seen wandering around and I figured with enough proliferation another such as myself might survive.