Yeah it's a little ironic because I'm in that camp - I think it's generally a turn-off for talented people who are happy with their jobs and have options and would personally not do anything that takes more than a couple of hours if I was just passively looking. But I'm active and trying to get this done, don't think staying put is a viable option and definitely want multiple offers to ensure that I can negotiate fairly. I'm also a little bit out of practice with coding so kind of welcomed having to write lots of code, whatever it is. This is also a remote job (they have an office where I live but this particular team is not there) so there was some expectation that this would replace an equally time-consuming onsite interview.

One of the biggest reasons for not doing a take-home is that as a candidate, you have no idea how serious they are about you because it's cheap to give them out - the fact that this seems to have been written for me and doesn't seem to be meant for reuse (because they had me publish my solution) at least reassured me that they are fairly serious about me as a candidate. I will definitely be quite annoyed if I'm not near the offer stage and they want me to go through more hoops from a technical standpoint.

I spent 7 hours on my take home for Netflix and got dinged for not writing a shadow dom to couple my presentation logic to instead of the real dom. I guess they wanted me to spend all weekend.

I don't know about "clearly talented" but TBH, I felt kind of bad at the end of the interview for not doing as well as I could and even worse when I saw the email. It was a shock honestly before this I assumed I'd pass every phone interview because I thought they were only designed to weed out the ones who clearly don't belong, of course then I found myself in that bucket.

Yeah I'm more obsessive and perfectionist than most when it comes to things like this - my take-home was smaller in scope than yours but I spent way more time, like 12 hours, not including the time I spent upgrading my Linux VM to the latest version of Ubuntu, which required two full updates, before I even started. I stayed up till like 2am last night to finish and I was mentally finished by 11:30. Also I think I'm a little more desperate than you were then - again, given where we are in the cycle economically, I don't want to drag this on till later in the year.

@candybar: FWIW and you may be well aware of this, try and discern the level of commitment to hiring the prospective employer has before you start jumping through their hoops. I've seen positions be open for 6 months+ where I know at least five in person interviews were conducted without a hire. Imagine getting to the point in the process of getting an in person interview and being rejected because the prospective employer was just "kicking the tires" more or less. There are many, many employers who have zero qualms about wasting your time.

Thanks - opengameart looks to have some promising stuff in their 'Open commissions'-forum!

I'll have a look there, thanks - though on first glance it looks a bit confusing/overwhelming with so much activity in just one forum-category (and no search-function as far I as I can find).

Good points. I'm probably not as sensitive about this as I normally would be because I feel very out of practice and could use some practices before I get to interviews for my top choices. I'm also interviewing at mostly large and fairly well-known places with clear hiring needs. Even what seems like a time-waster can be a confidence-booster for me at this stage.

Imagine if Larry legend funded a startup and hired everyone here, the suzzers and gaming mouses and candybars and such. Colossal clusterfluck, or massively successful product?

Colossal cluster****, would be my guess.

candybar, reading about your job hunt makes me despair for my own future.

I got the android emulator up and going despite a million hurdles, one of which was I have an AMD processor which it doesn't like, the other being I have a 4 year old computer and it took 30 mins to load the OS. time for a new machine. i've got like an ~$800 dollar budget, gonna try to get something nice that doesn't come preloaded with windows 10 (jk).

$800 is a really good budget. You can buy a very reasonable box with that amount and it's what I did about 15 months ago.

CPU: http://www.amazon.com/Intel-Core-i5-...-BX80646I54460
CPU cooler: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16835103099
Motherboard: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813157512
16GB of RAM: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820231615
256GB SSD: http://www.amazon.com/Crucial-MX200-...dp_ob_title_ce
1TB HD: http://www.amazon.com/Blue-Desktop-H.../dp/B0088PUEPK
Video card: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814487024
Power supply: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817207013
Case (not sure I'd recommend it tho): http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16811146083

$760 with $20 in mail in rebates and the motherboard comes with a free keyboard/mouse.

It runs like a champ. No issues with the Android emulator, I run a lot of virtual machines, video recording/editing, gaming, lots of programming crap open, etc.. Couldn't be happier really.

http://github.com/amzn/alexa-avs-raspberry-pi
RasPi as Amazon echo

candybar,

this is how i imagine things going down midway through your onsites: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxB-H6f3crY&t=54s

I find the viral aspect of the articles rather interesting. If you get an article on the front of HN, for example, you start getting a bunch of hits from twitter, facebook, and a bunch of other sites you never heard of.

At first, I was getting about 500 / day from the email, which is tapering down a bit, plus a bit from twitter, and now reddit already gained me 30 hits today (I didn't put it on Reddit).

The visit charts are quite different though. On HN, you get a large needle and not much long-tail. So far, the long-tail from the email has been considerably longer.

It looks like my article is surviving on Reddit longer than Tay survived Twitter, but someone already wrote "horse ****."

It would be the 1% startup that is profitable from day one.

They would create a framework called NodeRuby Monad, because they can.

The end-user would say "For that price, it better.... holy cow, it's brewing my coffee!"

That is a hell of coding test. Glad you enjoyed it. After all that work, what is the reason they'd say no?

i would never do this for free

Meh, you shouldn't feel that way. I have a fairly weak professional network for my age and experience level because I've only had two jobs in my career; and the first one was not in software development and the second and current one is at a tiny company with not much turnover. I don't go to meetups and stuff like that, have two kids and a fairly limited amount of time I can spend on networking. I'm also looking for fairly specific situations at specific types of companies and my current compensation #s are apparently high enough to scare off most head-hunters - I had one that was trying to argue with me that I must be making less than I am, like I'm trying to lie to him or something - mostly because the easiest people for them to work with are somewhat underpaid mid-senior talent that they can convince to jump with a clearly better pay package. So all my interviews are from internal referrals and applying to jobs on LinkedIn or company websites. My top three choices are still alive (all from referrals) and one of them (a top employer all of you are familiar with) somehow offered to bring me on-site without a phone screen on the strength of the referral and another gave me what I felt was a clear softball interview, also because my referral was from an engineering manager there and he got a few different teams there to show interest in me before I got to the phone screen. So while things are not going badly as it is, I know things could be going even better if my professional network was a little stronger.

I expect most people with the amount of experience that I have to have an easier time doing this - if you worked at a few different places where people move around and stuff, you should have more contacts at places you'd be interested in working at that can vouch for you.

This is how I felt before I started the job search but I'm definitely trying to optimize for the process. The whole thing pays for itself and then some if it lets me negotiate a higher salary at another company by even like 1%, assuming I learn nothing from it and I value my time extremely highly. And that's assuming that the job offer itself isn't worth anything or saying that I have an offer from X doesn't help get an offer at another place, etc. Given that I've been spending some of my free time practicing on HackerRank to prepare for some of those interviews, there's no doubt that doing a take-home for free still has much better ROI than anything else I could be doing.

More importantly, I'm definitely not gonna let any personal sense of entitlement interfere with the process. Of course there's some part of me that believes, hey I'm better than this and I shouldn't have to put up with this, but that's just not a productive mindset. I'm competing for things that are quite valuable and desired by many people and I'm willing to do a lot of work to get it.

Oh wow I remember that episode. Great stuff!

Maybe they don't like my coding style, maybe they find someone they like better, maybe like adios was talking about, the position doesn't really exist and they are just tire-kickers going through the motion.

Regarding the bolded, certainly. I don't know what your personal development process is but mine doesn't lend itself to something like HackerRank. When I am given a task where I am not clear on how to do something/the best approach, I like to develop the code iteratively and use a debugger to examine data and such as I go along. The timed tests I've taken on HackerRank don't really allow me to do that. Perhaps things have changed there, perhaps I am doing it wrong. I could be convinced otherwise regarding the efficacy of HackerRank.

You have an excellent attitude about this process.

Regarding this:

Quote:

I'm competing for things that are quite valuable and desired by many people and I'm willing to do a lot of work to get it.

I agree that you are competing. A competition implies to me anyway that there is probably a surplus of talent available or at least a lack of a shortage.

@jmakin - my experience has been that an experienced developer has to pretty much check all the boxes an employer wants, a relatively inexperienced developer not so much, just some of the key ones.

If we can't have a dream team startup staffed by this forum, we should at least get a podcast

I recommend we just have each person speak for 10 minutes, and play them all back simultaneously.

And backwards

https://blog.runspired.com/2016/03/2...negative-ways/

https://medium.com/@bdc/chrome-is-th...133#.3xh4hni8j

Lot of anti-chrome articles out today. Reminds me of why I stopped using chrome on I-devices.

Really this bad to develop for?

Epic less than sober video game marathons though.