Great News!
You have landed an interview with a tech company whom you wish to work for. All those job applications you have worked through, spending loads of your precious time and emotional effort on writing job applications and getting rejection after rejection. Finally, it has happened. You get through the first stage of the process and all seems well, and then you are told that in order to continue, you are obliged to complete some form of take home coding task.
Time required to complete - hours. Days?
You are frightened.
Is it worth the effort?
Does this sound familiar? Anyone who has been applying for jobs, especially in this current job market (at least, in the tech sector), will likely have had to do this. Many companies like to impose such “tests” on candidates as they do not believe the coding ability of said candidates. Fair enough, however there are some things to watch out for.
Whenever you, as a candidate, are set such a task, how do you not know that this might just be free work that a company is setting for you, with absolutely no chance whatsoever of getting a job at the end of it? Even if there was a chance, they could just as easily not want to employ you for unrelated purposes, such as a personality clash, or simply just not liking you. Considering that several candidates are interviewed for one position, yet only one can be hired, the return on investment strikes me as very low. In fact, I would liken this to…
Gambling.
Whenever I think of gambling, I picture individuals down on their luck in somewhere like Las Vegas, with no money and otherwise now living off the streets. Okay, maybe a little extreme, but you have to consider - when several hours of time are asked of you with a high chance of getting… nothing? Just kicked to the curb after all that effort, to likely be blacklisted from applying again. Would it not be wise to spend such time on something more useful?
I will refer to one personal example, where the prospective employer sent me 6 data files they wanted inspecting, plus a brief several pages long:
I will not mention the nature of the task, though I would have estimated this to take several hours, if not stretched over a few days, to complete. Suffice to say, I declined to progress the application after the company refused to compensate me, nor even sign an NDA so that they would not use this code without their permission. They claimed they had already solved said problem within the business. However, if my solution was better, they could still take it and claim it as their own without giving me any credit. This is arguably the sort of thing that a short term contract could be taken out for, even over a site like fiverr.com for example. This is not the only case I have seen of long technical tests being assigned as free work, I will remark.
A more public example is toptal.com - a site which claims that they hire the top 3% of talent for contracts. 3% refers to the proportion of applicants which pass their hoops, including a 1-3 week technical task(!)
Giving presentations I would say, is an exception, as it is not something that an employer can generally take away and claim it as theirs, without investing a lot of time to implement said ideas. This is also more typical for job applicants, not being restricted to tech roles.
It is said that time is your most precious resource in this life, yet such employers clearly do not value yours. So, what are you to do instead of spending your valuable time on fruitless tasks for other people who will cast you aside once you have delivered the goods with no compensation? I personally would look into improving skill set and brand, and working on side hustles, and then applying for jobs which do not have these time consuming and low ROI tasks. I would argue that these are far more useful experiences, if not monetary, than doing such tests.
I used to think that having to do technical tasks within the interview itself was a problem, but actually they are often shorter, more concise and generally do not require you to solve something extremely particular to the business. Whilst it is nerve wracking, at least you can generally confide in not having your work taken and being used without credit. I would personally encourage technical tasks like these, rather than take-home, as at least you know that the employer is investing their time into candidates. Sure, you could argue that it takes time for the employer to devise such tests in the first place, but at least it is their paid job to do so, unlike in the case of the candidate.
Employers do not need to look out for their candidates. Once you have failed, that is generally it. You are forgotten about, and discarded, regardless of how much effort and preparation you put into the hoops that they have devised. Just remember that if you consider taking on such convoluted job applications.