New trend at IT interviews: whole days of unpaid homework

Software developer interviews often include homework for several days.

Last year, a company with a job as a software developer offered this way to test my programmer abilities: write an application for delivering orders from a fictional restaurant. I was a little shocked. Developing such an application from scratch requires substantial time, and homework is not paid.

After a long weekend work, I was so exhausted that I gave up. I said that the vacancy is not interesting to me, but in reality I was alarmed by the method of such an interview.

I asked my friends if someone else was given homework. And I was not alone. Across the country, developers are faced with this practice. People spend from a few hours to more than three days completing unpaid tasks. In a speech at PyCon last year, developer Susan Tan said that she spent 32 hours on homework, but in the end she wasn’t taken anyway, because the program lacked a function that was not even mentioned in the original requirements. She says that she usually didn’t receive any feedback at all after doing the work — a typical problem amongst the developers interviewed. Eric Umenhofer from Silicon Valley ran into tests that required a full three days of work.
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“In the Bay Area, they are already used to this,” he said. “When one company starts this practice, others notice it and follow the example.”

How homework became part of the IT interview

For the first full-fledged work in 2010, I passed a six-hour unstructured interview [an interview in which the verbal form of the questions and the order of the questions themselves are not planned in advance - approx. trans.]. As was customary in the IT industry at that time, I spoke with each member of the team about my experience and skills. Some of them prepared questions, others did not.

Numerous studies show that such interviews are a potential source of bias and do not provide an accurate assessment of candidates .

Later, the IT industry offered other forms of testing to test skills, including to avoid such bias. This includes a whiteboarding interview where the candidate is asked to state a solution for a puzzle, such as an algorithm for the sequence of the first 25 prime numbers.

This approach was also taken hostile: critics said that these tests are not similar to the usual work of most programmers . Then, Google recognized the most famous proponent of such puzzles: even their own research did not reveal a significant correlation between solving puzzles and the candidate’s abilities . Tests with the board buried.

In this vacuum, “homework” arose, where developers are given to solve actual problems in a comfortable home environment on their own computers.

Problem with homework at interviews

A few days of free work as part of a job application is an inconvenience for everyone, but this requirement may exacerbate bias against those groups that are already underrepresented in technology, such as women. In our country, women still perform most of the domestic work in caring for children , which leaves them with much less free time to perform such tests. As software developer Gabriela Woicu told me, many women do not have time for "programmer tasks with an incomprehensible outcome, which do not know whether they will be useful." She was particularly annoyed that some companies presented such tasks as a way to eliminate discrimination and a more equitable recruitment process. “If this is their goal, then this is an imperfect decision,” she said.

Since homework began to be offered relatively recently, there are no studies that compare their effectiveness with other methods of hiring. But some HR managers claim that it is possible to assess the abilities of programmers without such an investment of time.

Pete Holiday, development manager for CallRail in Atlanta, handed out homework during the interview process, but later realized that good candidates disappeared. Some said that they do not have time for homework. Others may not even have reached this stage. “A simple office interview gives you more coverage,” says Holiday. - You do not expect that they will have time or have a computer at home. There are candidates with sick relatives, single parents. Without homework, you can expand your reach. ”

Holiday also noted that some candidates were unfamiliar with the specific framework that was offered to them for the task, but were clearly able to study it.

Holiday Company now uses the “Live Programming Interview” structured format, which includes joint code auditing and discussion. Usually the process takes from 30 minutes to an hour.

Alistair Davidson, a technical architect from London, said that his company made the same choice when it learned that it took the candidate 16 hours to complete the “small” homework they had proposed. “[The live interview] gives a better idea of ​​how it is to work with a person and solve a problem with him,” he said.

At the same time, many developers, especially those of a higher level, simply begin to answer “No, thank you” to the offer to do their homework. And I will do the same when I find myself in the labor market again.