I agree with the philosophy although I'll note you're not taking one thing into account. And that is how much human time is spent *reviewing* whatever special little project they assign to you. If the answer is zero, then you're exactly right.

However, speaking just for myself as an interviewer, I will generally spend a couple of hours per-candidate reviewing any work samples, etc that are asked of a candidate. If we've asked them to invest their time in such a thing, it only makes sense to respect their time by investing my own.

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colechristensen 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

That's what the leeway is for. Two hours per candidate seems like quite a lot of time and is nothing like any of the interviews I have been involved in on either side of the table.

	▲	jghn 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		I would agree that it's not typical. However I firmly believe that it is imperative for interviewers to treat the candidate as the more valuable commodity. As such, I will spend a fair amount of time per-candidate as I know they themselves are investing a good bit of their own time & energy.

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AnimalMuppet 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That's interesting. My expectation was that, if I did a four-hour assignment, they were going to spend 5 minutes evaluating it.

I wonder if you are typical, or if typical is closer to my 5 minute impression?

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aplummer 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

I spend a lot longer than candidates do on themselves if they have open source (or if an internal transfer, internal) code I can review.

50% that I’m terrified of bad hires, 50% I recognize the opportunity and gravity from their side so try to respect that.

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at-fates-hands 6 days ago | parent [-]

>> if they have open source (or if an internal transfer, internal) code I can review.

I give you a lot of credit for doing this. When I was still in development, I had a pretty robust github page, a sizable portfolio of stuff I had built and other side projects I was working on with various other platforms like Salesforce.

Not once did an interviewer review any of that. I would find myself referring to my github page several times over during the interview. I got so frustrated with interviewers asking me how to do simple things in interviews, I finally walked out of several and told them if they had just taken five minutes and looked at any of my github projects, they would've saved themselves a lot of time asking stupid questions about basic stuff.

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sgerenser 6 days ago | parent [-]

Unfortunately, most people’s GitHub accounts are just a smattering of forked repos with maybe one or two (or no) commits done by them. Unless you look closely, it would be easy to be fooled by the average candidates github that is essentially meaningless.

	▲	RugnirViking 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		then don't hire most people? idk, I really can't imagine hiring someone that not only had such a github profile, but saw fit to send it to the interviewer look for repos that aren't forked, especially one that doesn't have all or most of its code committed in a single commit (i.e. forked with extra steps)

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jghn 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

My observation has been that the 5 minute angle is far more common. But it's also not like I'm the only person out there like myself on this topic.

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erikerikson 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

And yet, I can't recall receiving a counter submission of feedback and summary of the review for the work I've submitted, whether I got the job or not.

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Aurornis 6 days ago | parent [-]

I gave feedback like this when I first started doing interviews

I had to stop very quickly when I realized how many candidates take it as an invitation to argue, accuse me of being wrong, or see it as an invite to redo the problem and resubmit.

I also had one case where someone tried to go on a rampage against me and the company because they though our rejection was unfair (the candidate wasn’t even top 5 among the applicants)

	▲	erikerikson 6 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Thank you, I appreciate that you made the effort. Many companies won't allow it due to legal risk, not to mention the social risks you report and related. Our solving and counter-solving leads us into fairly dysfunctional places.
	▲	bartread 6 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I’ve had people come back at me after giving feedback, which I always do give for anyone I’ve spoken to. They argue, they ask for a second chance, etc. I simply tell them my decision is final and stop responding to further communication attempts. I have no problem doing that. But that’s a minority: most people just appreciate getting some feedback, and not being ghosted. And if they’ve taken an hour out of their day to speak to me, providing a short piece of (ideally actionable) feedback, or at least that explains where their experience or skills didn’t match up to other applicants, is the least I can do. It’s also an opportunity to provide encouragement on positive aspects of the interview, even if those weren’t enough to carry the day. You have to understand that even - perhaps especially - unsuccessful applicants will talk about their experience of your hiring process. Unless you work somewhere that people really want to work, and where they’ll be willing to wade through shit to do it (cough, Google, cough - perhaps Google of yore anyway), you want to be doing everything you can to ensure that even unsuccessful applicants are treated well and have as positive an experience as possible. It won’t always work out but, in my experience, the extra effort is worthwhile.