This company posts their job listings on HN, and I applied a while back. I got this email today:
Last December, you applied to a Software Engineering role here at ReMatter. Unfortunately, we haven't been able to interview as many people as we would have liked to for this role. So, we'd like to open up our process more broadly and make our interview funnel available to more folks.
I'm attaching a pdf of our challenge here. If you'd like to give it a go, try to complete it in the next two weeks. It's a fairly significant challenge, but it closely mirrors our day-to-day work and successful completion of the challenge carries significant weight in our interview consideration. If you're no longer interested or have accepted another position in the meantime, sorry to bug you! I apologize that we couldn't get back to you sooner. Best wishes in your new role!
Otherwise, let me know if you have any questions about the challenge.
The attached challenge is to OCR a driver's license in a web app.
Offering a bit of free insight for them and others looking for candidates. I was going to send this back as an email, but I figured it might be of interest to others:
- You've emailed the candidate two months after their application to ask them to do a code challenge that by your admission is a sizable burden for a working professional.
- You've not-very-subtly implied that the candidate was not your first choice, as if you're throwing them a bone.
- In the pdf it states you want the user to host it somewhere, which gives me a hunch that whoever does the first review on this can't be expected to build the app.
- In the PDF you bolded and italicized that you want a private github repo. Why?
- When you mention that it's a smaller version of a feature you "recently built", that implies to me you're still in an early enough state that a competent code challenge could influence your actual implementation, making a candidate's submission free work for you.
At a high level, you've asked a candidate to invest an annoying amount of time to give you some work from which you might even be able to take real inspiration (or even worse, copy), having put in zero effort on your end, and offered no compensation for their effort.
I am sure your approach comes from confidence in your firm's appeal to candidates, but I find the message itself a very negative signal. Most experienced folks will turn this down, so I guess it lines up with your implication that you're reducing standards (or can't figure out how to choose candidates, or how to interview them? I can't tell, it just smells bad.)
I think you should take this down. It doesn't make you look good. So you think the coding challenge is beneath you and are offended you were not their first choice, don't do it then. Maybe you're an ace with job offers left and right, but at a time in the industry when many are looking for work who would give their right arm for any decent opportunities, it makes you look whiny, entitled and lazy, and like you're looking for an excuse not to complete the challenge because you're incapable of doing so. My 2 cents.
Or maybe companies shouldn't be outsourcing labor to applicants, asking them to do two weeks of work for free. This is not a reasonable take-home challenge by any means, for any company, and I'm glad they're being named and shamed I respect the OP for recognizing boundaries and sticking by them.
The two-month delay aside, which is stupid but quite common, the likely reason for asking for a private GitHub repo is to not leak your solution to other candidates. You can always add a LICENSE.md to your repo with two lines saying that the code is not meant for any kind of reuse. You can also change the repo to public after a few months.
I personally actually like being assessed via take-home challenges but understandably it is not everyone's favourite.
I had a similar problem back in the day when I applied for a job with a small, local payroll company. The MD was a nice guy and a small staff of a dozen long-term people. He figured the best way of seeing if I'd be "a good fit" would be to set me a task and go from there. Fine .. I did that and he set me another which was more payroll-business specific. Again, I did this, but then he came up with another one, and I realised he was getting me to develop his next project for free. I declined and made a hasty exit.
Yeah, I got the same email from the same person. Now, I'm feeling skeptical about this code challenge. The way you outlined it sounds perfectly reasonable that this person is trying to get free code from people that are actually looking for a dev job. I'm not going to do the code challenge anymore due to the lack of time that was made from the interviewer to respond back to my application.
Last December, you applied to a Software Engineering role here at ReMatter. Unfortunately, we haven't been able to interview as many people as we would have liked to for this role. So, we'd like to open up our process more broadly and make our interview funnel available to more folks. I'm attaching a pdf of our challenge here. If you'd like to give it a go, try to complete it in the next two weeks. It's a fairly significant challenge, but it closely mirrors our day-to-day work and successful completion of the challenge carries significant weight in our interview consideration. If you're no longer interested or have accepted another position in the meantime, sorry to bug you! I apologize that we couldn't get back to you sooner. Best wishes in your new role! Otherwise, let me know if you have any questions about the challenge.
The attached challenge is to OCR a driver's license in a web app.
Offering a bit of free insight for them and others looking for candidates. I was going to send this back as an email, but I figured it might be of interest to others:
- You've emailed the candidate two months after their application to ask them to do a code challenge that by your admission is a sizable burden for a working professional.
- You've not-very-subtly implied that the candidate was not your first choice, as if you're throwing them a bone.
- In the pdf it states you want the user to host it somewhere, which gives me a hunch that whoever does the first review on this can't be expected to build the app.
- In the PDF you bolded and italicized that you want a private github repo. Why?
- When you mention that it's a smaller version of a feature you "recently built", that implies to me you're still in an early enough state that a competent code challenge could influence your actual implementation, making a candidate's submission free work for you.
At a high level, you've asked a candidate to invest an annoying amount of time to give you some work from which you might even be able to take real inspiration (or even worse, copy), having put in zero effort on your end, and offered no compensation for their effort.
I am sure your approach comes from confidence in your firm's appeal to candidates, but I find the message itself a very negative signal. Most experienced folks will turn this down, so I guess it lines up with your implication that you're reducing standards (or can't figure out how to choose candidates, or how to interview them? I can't tell, it just smells bad.)
what is it? a SaaS company for scrap yard business operations? they're not stealing the code; they're recycling it.
i dont do coding challneges. that's when i start ghosting employers.
I think you should take this down. It doesn't make you look good. So you think the coding challenge is beneath you and are offended you were not their first choice, don't do it then. Maybe you're an ace with job offers left and right, but at a time in the industry when many are looking for work who would give their right arm for any decent opportunities, it makes you look whiny, entitled and lazy, and like you're looking for an excuse not to complete the challenge because you're incapable of doing so. My 2 cents.
Or maybe companies shouldn't be outsourcing labor to applicants, asking them to do two weeks of work for free. This is not a reasonable take-home challenge by any means, for any company, and I'm glad they're being named and shamed I respect the OP for recognizing boundaries and sticking by them.
The two-month delay aside, which is stupid but quite common, the likely reason for asking for a private GitHub repo is to not leak your solution to other candidates. You can always add a LICENSE.md to your repo with two lines saying that the code is not meant for any kind of reuse. You can also change the repo to public after a few months.
I personally actually like being assessed via take-home challenges but understandably it is not everyone's favourite.
I had a similar problem back in the day when I applied for a job with a small, local payroll company. The MD was a nice guy and a small staff of a dozen long-term people. He figured the best way of seeing if I'd be "a good fit" would be to set me a task and go from there. Fine .. I did that and he set me another which was more payroll-business specific. Again, I did this, but then he came up with another one, and I realised he was getting me to develop his next project for free. I declined and made a hasty exit.
Yeah, I got the same email from the same person. Now, I'm feeling skeptical about this code challenge. The way you outlined it sounds perfectly reasonable that this person is trying to get free code from people that are actually looking for a dev job. I'm not going to do the code challenge anymore due to the lack of time that was made from the interviewer to respond back to my application.