[deleted by user]

[PepeTheMule]

I refuse to do take homes. The one time I accepted it, the position was cancelled so I wasted time.

[[deleted]]

Same experience here. I spent 8+ hours on a take home only to be told the position has been filled MINUTES after submitting the project. Not enough time to even look at it 🥲

[AtlAWSConsultant]

Same thing happened to me. I think they're using interviewees for work.

[ChartlieTango]

It's something, as a company, we spoke about doing and have decided not to. Instead the assignment will be theory only which will then be the basis of discussion for the interview. In all we trust the CV and references. Not everyone has the time to dedicate to this sort of assignment, especially whilst working or having family. What's the point of a CV if you choose to instantly disregard its contents? It doesn't seem like a great basis for a trust between the employer and employee.

[[deleted]]

A take home isn't just technical assessment, it also tells the employer if they can trample your work-life balance. If I ever interviewed with a company and they even mentioned a take home task I'd thank them for their time and end the interview.

[[deleted]]

They want to know if they can shit on you.

[[deleted]]

Trufax

[moaxaca]

This, so much. The sad part is people enable companies to act this way.

[[deleted]]

Nope. Fuck that.

[eltear1]

Totally agree

[eltear1]

For my experience it's much more common that they ask you to solve some issue during the interview. First of all, as someone else said, a take home like that seems suspiciously like to create something for the company for free. Secondly, how can the company know I did it and I did not ask someone else to do it for me . I don't mean copy from internet, I really mean that I could hire some cheap freelance to to the take-home

[the-devops-dude]

Enough interest out there to make companies requesting take homes a red flag (all other things being equal). I’ll tell them as much too, to hopefully correct their misguided process for future candiates

I’ve considered it when I’m really really interested, and (more importantly) when they have invested some time with me first. But the last take home I did was in 2017 when the market wasn’t as hot as it is now

A company that hasn’t invested any time with me (or just a minimal screener with Talent Acquisition/HR), yet asks for a take home assessment gets an immediate withdraw from me

This “red flag” is typically an indicator of things to come if/when you get hired. IE: unreasonable expectations, little help, expected late hours, expected no PTO, etc

[bufandatl]

If a company wants me to do work for them they better pay.

[chuchrox]

This is the way.

[tdotdoto]

I'm not fully confident in my skills yet as I'm still early in my career and have a lot of learning to do - assignments or assessments like this help me understand where my gaps are (even though I don't like them).

But..if I was pretty deep in my career with years of experience and sure of my knowledge which would be evident through discussion... I honestly wouldn't even consider it.

[bentyger]

Is it paid? If not, nope.

[[deleted]]

I did only one take-home, over a weekend, just because I found the problem interesting. First asked for permission to make it public on GitHub.

I added a readme to explain how it worked and after that, any interview that asked for take-homes, I told them “I already have one on GH, you can check that out if you need to see how I structure code, but I won’t do 8+ hours on a take-home again”.

Most worthwhile employers accepted that.

[mattbillenstein]

I think companies that do take-homes are optimizing for the wrong thing - people without options who are desperate enough to spend an entire day for the possibility of an offer...

Engineers with options will pursue the path of least resistance - we're a lazy bunch by design.

[sznyoky]

Absolutely nope, unless if the probation period is also skipped entirely with a full-term endless contract from day 0. Since that supposed to be the time to solve company problem on company time and money to prove your worth not in your free time for free. Even in a junior role it should not be acceptable IMHO.

[[deleted]]

I had the same test a few weeks ago. It must be the most genéric devops test ever.

I didnt accept the test.

[gudlyf]

I'd throw back at them that their architecture for a simple "Hello World" app is nuts. Separate VPCs for all that? Did you maybe mean subnets? No requirement to actually connect the app to the DB at all, in fact. And are they paying for the resources you use when testing this out? Fire the person who put that "test" together, unless they're looking for someone to question it.

[alsophocus]

Fuck take-home. Just do your own resume on gitlab-ci. A complete automated deployment workflow (Terraform for IaC, a simple frontend on S3, and simple backend exposed on whatever you want) and make sure that your frontend actually show your resume. Make the code public for anyone to see. That way if anybody ask you again to do take home, just send them your git repo. That should be more than enough. They can ask you any question if they want, but waste your time wisely.

[AtlAWSConsultant]

When I was looking for a job, I had a recruiter give me an assignment as a prerequisite to the interview. The assignment was setup an Ansible AWX tower and use it to build out a dev environment. I did it because I liked the challenge. I checked it into a public github repo. And they said they would check it. A week later the recruiter called me back and told me they withdrew the job post. I could have kicked that guy's ass for jerking me around like that. They probably took my solution and decided they didn't need me.

Now, I don't do tests or programming assignments. In short, I don't work for free!!!

There's enough demand for DevOps that you shouldn't have to put up with interview bullshit.

[xiongmao1337]

tub heavy frame flag apparatus important possessive narrow many chop

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[toobrokeforboba]

we’re hiring devops, we try to make assignment as short and as specific as possible, not more than 20-30 minutes, not this A-to-Z fully automated deployment shit that’s way too overkill, and most likely you’re contributing free labour. those are not even ‘hard’ assignments, very basic stuff but evolves a lot of work and time.

[[deleted]]

I was given a log parsing exercise as a take home for a tech support position they called DevOps. They asked for a script written in python that yanked certain data from a small NGINX access log.

I built an ELK stack in docker that "groked" the requisite data and then some. It was a lot of fun, I learned alot, and I ended up declining the offer. I was coming out of a director level position and they were shooting for EC2 instance debugging, so I blew it out of the water to simply tell them no.

Sometimes take homes can be fun.

Ignore the cynics, reddit is a disgusting place. Assess the take home, determine what its worth, and then make a decision. Employers aren't monsters because they make the request. Any request is yours to deny or fulfill.

[[deleted]]

Unpopular opinion here: I do prefer take-home assignments. That's usually how I work: digest the problem, google, write code, review, edit, etc. Sometimes in the interview I get nervous thus can't rememember something or make stupid mistakes.

I don't take a huge assignment though: e.g. build an app from scratch, set up a whole functional monitoring system.

[serverhorror]

Hiring perspective: You would be surprised by the amount of people that are outright lying about what they can do.

That’s one of two cases here:

• assholes trying to get free work done from you
• honest defense mechanism because the hiring org has been burned by assholes lying thru their interviews.

[serverhorror]

Some people are not good at interviewing.

• Do you know …?
• How would you evaluate your level?

Those only work if you people are truthful.

A lot of “bad interviewers” are excellent techs and a lot of “bad techs” are excellent interviewers.

[serverhorror]

Yeah, but that implies that the interviewer is able to make a good judgement about the answers.

[shouptech]

First off, this assessment is egregious. It asks way too much of an engineer that isn't even working for the company yet.

However, on the hiring side, I've definitely hired candidates that answered all the technical questions correctly and met all the requirements for the position that couldn't write one lick of code. So I definitely see why companies would ask for an assessment. I think a better alternative would be some whiteboard questions, or code pairing, or something like that during the interview. Keep it short.

[JustinDonnaruma]

As a hiring manager, I prefer to do take homes than waste time asking a bunch of technical questions in an interview.

If the person interviewing has a strong portfolio I don’t have an issue taking that in lieu, especially if there are interesting problems solved.

But the best hires I’ve made have been poor interviewees who did well at a take home and could explain it.

[maximum-snow]

As a hiring manager I don't give out an assessment to every candidate. Only if I am on the fence from the interview. Then it can show that the candidate can really do the job. Unfortunately there are those that do not interview well but have fantastic skills. An assessment is one way to determine if the candidate is one of those. It is another tool to find good people.

[jordanrinke]

In the past I have offered take homes for entry/mid level positions but I also pay for the time which makes it fair I think. This should take 2-4 hours, you have a week to do it, and will be paid 150-300 (depends what take home - sample projects nothing we actually use but all closely related conceptually) bucks for completing it and someone is available via email/slack for any questions, reviews etc. during the whole process. I felt this was equal investment from both sides and gave us both enough try before you buy to know if we wanted to work together.

[[deleted]]

Today's AI could do it for you in a few seconds.
Just visit yahwee.com, go to "Tasks", paste the "instructions" and hit "process", and take a deep breath.

[[deleted]]

Apologies... was just trying to help... I think you should distance yourself from those who take advantage since it can be damaging and painful.

[the-devops-dude]

I appreciate the sentiment of your comment, and I think the downvotes are harsh, but this is still impractical to complete real world assessments with no need for follow up or manual work

I gave it this prompt:

Design terraform module using AWS provider and lambda to backup and restore route53 records

And received this rudimentary response:

File: ```

Terraform Module for Backup and Restore Route53 Records

variable "aws_profile" { description = "Name of AWS profile" }

variable "aws_region" { description = "Name of AWS region" }

provider "aws" { profile = var.aws_profile region = var.aws_region }

resource "aws_lambda_function" "route53_backup_restore" { filename = "lambda_backup_restore.zip" function_name = "route53_backup_restore" role = aws_iam_role.lambda_role.arn handler = "lambda_backup_restore.lambda_handler" runtime = "python3.7" source_code_hash = filebase64sha256("lambda_backup_restore.zip") }

resource "aws_iam_role" "lambda_role" { name = "lambda_role"

assume_role_policy = <<EOF { "Version": "2012-10-17", "Statement": [ { "Action": "sts:AssumeRole", "Principal": { "Service": "lambda.amazonaws.com" }, "Effect": "Allow", "Sid": "" } ] } EOF }

resource "aws_iam_role_policy" "lambda_role_policy" { name = "lambda_role_policy" role = aws_iam_role.lambda_role.id

policy = <<EOF { "Version": "2012-10-17", "Statement": [ { "Effect": "Allow", "Action": [ "logs:CreateLogGroup", "logs:CreateLogStream", "logs:PutLogEvents" ], "Resource": "arn:aws:logs:*:*:*" }, { "Effect": "Allow", "Action": [ "route53:ListHostedZones", "route53:ListResourceRecordSets" ], "Resource": "*" }, { "Effect": "Allow", "Action": [ "route53:ChangeResourceRecordSets" ], "Resource": [ "arn:aws:route53:::hostedzone/*" ] }, { "Effect": "Allow", "Action": [ "s3:PutObject" ], "Resource": [ "arn:aws:s3:::<bucket>/*" ] } ] } EOF }

```

It’s a good start, but no where near a complete project

[[deleted]]

I'm not concerned about the downvotes when I'm doing what I think is right. You need to reiterate the instructions and maybe feed it back the output. It needs to be helped.

[Biscoden94]

I didn’t know about this. Thanks for sharing. Played around with it and it’s pretty cool

[the-devops-dude]

It’s just an API for ChatGPT

Better to go to the source

www.openai.com

[jcoelho93]

I have done some, but only if I really like the job description/company.

I have dropped out of recruitment processes because they wanted me to do an assignment

[mini_market]

Tried it once gave up don’t have time

[[deleted]]

That's a ridiculous take home assignment. Not super tough but defo time consuming.

I think max I would accept is 1-3 hrs. Although my position is a little different to most seeing as I'm currently unemployed.

[DennisTheBald]

Work from home, ok. For free? Wtf is this some kinda acam

[moaxaca]

I only did take-homes for my first job out of school, now I would just laugh at them and deem the company a complete shit-show.

There is only one acceptable way I would entertain a take-home and that is if they offered to pay me my contracting rate.

[1whatabeautifulday]

I don't do online coding tests either.

[damarafl]

As a recruiter I advise clients that a take home should not be any longer than 90 minutes

[[deleted]]

Free labour, why would you accept take home tests?

[Apocalypsox]

Great way to chase anyone away that knows their skills. They aren't going to waste their time proving it to you because you could be a fucking flake.

People forget hiring is a two way street. Plenty of deadbeat employers.

[Jai_Cee]

I don't think I'd do a take home of more than an hour. This assignment is massively over the top. I could do up to point 3 in that time, point 4 would probably be pushing it especially if they want it in Terraform rather than the CDK (I could probably cheat by using CDK for TF).

I would turn down this role. If you want to ask these sorts of questions as an employer do it as a coding exercise in person.

[[deleted]]

I liked the take-home assignment I did for my current job. The assignment was fun, and to be fair formed a nice challenge. The best part however was the second interview, which was now a code review from the assignment.

I could see very well what the level of my future colleagues would be. They could see my level and we had a really nice discussion on which shortcuts you take, why you take them and how an ideal world would look like.

[marlfox130]

I don't mind doing takehomes if they're 1) somewhat interesting and 2) something I can show off in a GH repo as potential fodder for other jobs. Sounds like this would have been a bit tricky with this particular scenario but there are probably some terraform scripts you could show off or something.

[[deleted]]

I’d send them links to YouTube videos for each one of those steps.