I don't think anyone is giving you psychological help. I think most people are impressed at what you have done so far. Especially giving your history. It's really inspirational.

sigh

I take it back. I hate sysadmin stuff so much. Literally have had my jaw clenched for the last two hours just going through error message after error message.

This.

You have a massive amount of passion for technology and learning and clearly take considerable pride in your work and work hard, while at the same time never feeling sorry for yourself.

Its pretty ****ing rad.

What type of errors?

The first time is the worst time.

The second time is "****, I did this before and I"m still an idiot."

The third time is 15 minutes.

That's cute.

I did another home technical test last night. This one was a little bit harder than than the last one.

I fully suspect deja vu at this interview.

I kind of enjoy these employment tests. I'm disappointed that they aren't more difficult, but I can see how it would remove quite a few people from the pool.

barrin6, Larry Legend, thanks for the kind words.

What did you do to get good at them? I need a lot of work on interview type algorithm questions

Was the technical test for a different company? Do a lot of companies give take home test prior to interviews?

Mostly I just ran into small problems from incorrect config until I finally got it to connect to the vagrant box. Then it told me it was missing the aptitude module which I'm pretty sure is supposed to be a core ansible module which put me on tilt. I then tried another github ansible/rails project that didn't use the debops tool and that failed to install nginx giving some unmet dependecy problem. When I ssh'd into the box my usual apt-get tricks failed and I realized what a complete noob I am.

It all looked so simple in the tutorials...

Friend of mine is applying at Salesforce and is writing an entire app for them, scheduled to take a week...

I had to do this once for a company and then didn't get the job. After that, I won't ever do it again. If my current portfolio isn't good enough, then I'm not going to waste my time unless they pay my hourly to do a interview test.

At the company I used to work for, it was common for a while for us to give a candidate who got through the interview process a small real-world task to do as a contractor, which we paid for, and which served as a technical test. I agree it would be super annoying if unpaid, but it worked far better than interviewing for gauging technical skill imo.

If it's a couple hours, that's no big deal. Anything over a day, I would refuse. I think paying for that work would be a nice compromise.

We thought about going the route of paying someone to do a small project as part of the hiring process but decided it was to much hassle for IP and other legal reasons.

Is it common?

If you are counting the number of contractors who are eventually hired full time, I would say it's very common.

This test was from another company, and yes, the test was for SQL, and no, it would surprise me if my coworker was there an hour before me again.

These tests are nothing more than a .doc with 5 to 10 questions. None of them are particularly hard, but if you don't know the material very well, it will take you too long to do the test, but if you know the material well, then it should only take an hour, 2 hours top. So, it's a nice little filter.

The one I did last night had 4 questions with a) and b) sections. I finished it in about an hour, but I was also sick as a dog and fighting sleep, so I'm sure some of the answers were wonky. I just wanted to turn it in the same day.

I did have this from some well-known company:

Our interview process is straight-forward. If interested, you would contact me and we would schedule a 30 minute phone interview. In the next step we send you a homework assignment that is representative of the day-to-day work you would be doing [here]. When you finish it, we review it, and then bring you in for an in-person interview where we do an informal code review of your submitted project with several senior members of the development teams.

They describe it as straight-forward, but this was for a senior position.

Sort of repeating what I said above. There's no way to get good at it through second-guessing. Either you know it or you don't. I took one test a few months ago that made me cry uncle. This was an online test with a 60 minute time-limit. I had to get 4 out of the 8 available. I got 3 of them but couldn't get the last one to work. I take my personal time-limit from this, but of course, I'm more relaxed without one eye looking at a countdown.

I have no idea if those 'nailing the interview'-type books are any good. I've looked at some interview sites, and some of them have some interesting food for thought. Surprisingly, I haven't found many questions I couldn't answer after taking an intro course. I don't know how to feel about that. I'd hope that an employer would ask more challenging questions than that aside from basic filtration.

From what I hear it's becoming more common in the bay area. There used to be more projects of this size requested for free, but a few places got busted for having candidates do actual work, using the code, and hiring no one.

As a result you see these contracting arrangements or more basic one offs

Today, I was interviewing someone. I always have one of my coworkers with me when I interview. Our styles deeply contrast. He likes asking about working experience, and I like to talk about how great it is to work at the company (fast-growing, autonomy, ability to make a huge impact, etc (These things are true, but the job sort of sucks, like any job)).

One of the requirements we have is a typing test (I never took one), which is more or less an FAQ from our boss that has little to no bearing on anything. While the applicant is taking a typing test, we sometimes have a 1-minutes discussion about the person in the next office. It is kind of funny, because we seldom agree.

He said to me "I don't the she is interested because she never asked about pay during the interview." It never occurred to me that everyone asked, though I have vivid memories of people asking. It's pretty uncomfortable, tbh.

We went back and I showed some of the cool little things we were working on, and then finally, I asked if she had more questions. "What about compensation?"

My coworker came up to me later and asked if she asked about pay. He then said, "Oh, wow. Maybe she was interested after all."

During the SQL interview, they brought up everything but the raw number. I honestly didn't give a **** because the job sounded interesting and its not an epic challenge to beat my currently salary. Now I'm wondering if I should have asked what the hourly / yearly pay is. I honestly don't see how it would have made a difference. Isn't that HR stuff anyways? I mean, what if they mumbled "well... uh like $25-ish" and now I put them on the spot?

Asking about pay during the interview is a mistake I think. Either ask about the pay before the interview so you don't waste anyone's time by interviewing, or just wait until an offer is made.

I've only ever read that asking about compensation during an interview is a faux pas.

Yeah probably best to do the first one given the nature of the LA job market. The number of jobs asking outrageous skills and experience while offering near minimum wage is absurd.

I was thinking more about a really short contract as opposed to something like a 3-6 month contract.

In the NYC area I'd say its pretty rare that we have someone that doesn't currently have a job (new graduates excluded) so it seems like it would be hard to get them to do 1-5 days work on a contract for us without running into legal pain-in-the-ass stuff.

Interesting.

Can't remember ever asking about pay during an interview. Actually, it's in almost all cases the other way around: The potential employer would ask me what I'd have in mind. That question opens up another can of worms if you're not sure how much you want.

I was always told to ask about pay in interviews, but I think that was because of the way my school did co-op placements you didn't really have a traditional offer from the employer stage so when deciding between multiple options you needed to know the pay range up front.

As an interviewer I don't really care one way or the other and if I'm asked I generally give a very ball park qualitative answer and say if we make an offer we'll cover all of the compensation details.