To standout, you have to be a bit creative and you must sustain yourself with your own company / startup. (4 basic instructions here) [0]
Companies do not care about you or your take home solution(s) unless you've built something that threatens their existence with a competing product that makes money and steals their users.
Stop playing by their rules with these interview 'games' unless you have lots of time. Spend your time elsewhere. You now have AI, and you should build a startup instead.
If this had been limited to 3 hours then the worst case is that the candidate would have lost 3 hours, but far more likely is that they would have come up with an entirely different proposal and/or solution that was appropriate for that timeline, and that extra information would have made it clearer what the company was looking for.
The other point I'd always encourage applicants to confirm is: are you looking for any answer, or are you looking for a good answer. Some take-home tests are purely about passing a test suite and how you manage it doesn't matter, some would prefer that you meet 80% of the requirements but write better code. I've seen applicants do the wrong thing on both sides of this.
Surely there must be other ways to have an idea on a candidate’s skills.
In our case, hiring people with data engineering skills, we just ask of them a simple ETL challenge (pull data from zip file, transform it, insert into any database). We leave ambiguities in there and there are some Easter eggs in the dataset (eg null values where you would not expect it, incorrectly formatted CSV) that we use to evaluate how well a candidate can perform.
We timebox it at 4 hours, but don’t give guidance in case they run out of time, that’s a good suggestion.
During a follow up call, we review the code together and we’ll ask them questions on how to improve the code (“what if the dataset doesn’t fit in memory”, etc), which is what the actual technical assessment is. At that point they should already feel somewhat comfortable with the problem domain, and you can assess their real skills.
People should be paid for the time they spend in interviews.
You make that the law and this ambiguous hoop jumping bullshit goes away real fast. Companies will optimize for cost instead of dumping cost onto the prospective employees.
This is good for the economy because it forces companies to innovate and optimize the interview process and it saves hundreds hours of totally economically unproductive time on the part of candidates.
At my current gig we do a 1-hour pair programming kind of thing, where we video-chat and watch the candidate work on a small, straightforward task. And as the interviewer I watch how they use the tools, where they go for docs, do they read the requirements, how do they test, etc. By the end I always feel like I have a strong picture of their ability, and the whole thing is capped at 90 minutes for both sides (adding time for their questions).
If the candidate's code was written offline beforehand, I'd have no idea whether it was theirs, whether it came from a friend or chatGPT, whether it took ten minutes or ten hours, etc. Sure I could try to suss out those things during discussion, but isn't it better to observe directly?
Because you can't guarantee all candidates are spending the same amount of time, it becomes a game theory problem where the candidates will typically lose in some form. In many cases, the right answer is to spend extra time making a really polished (but not too polished!) solution and pretend like you stayed in the time limit. And every candidate is either a) doing that, or at least b) worried that their competition is doing that.
Even if we ignore that dynamic, 3 hours is a long ass time for a candidate to spend when they're not even sure they'll get to talk to another human about it.
In a 1-hour interview, you can run a candidate through a programming exercise and be guaranteed they're not wasting extra time on it. And if they happen to prefer doing take home assessments, you can always let them send you an updated answer later. (But often by the time a candidate asks me if they can do that, I've already developed a favorable view of their skills and can tell them, "go for it if you want, but you've already 'passed' my test.")
By keeping the candidate-interviewer time investment the same, you guarantee that you're respecting the candidate's time as you would your own (because you're sitting there with them.) I can help them skip over the parts I'm not interested in (e.g., by feeding them info they'd be able to find via search or telling them not to worry about certain details.)
If a hiring manager doesn't respect their candidates' time, how likely are they to respect their employees' time?
In some cases we roughly timed it, scheduling an email for a time the candidate wanted and asked them to return it 3 hours later. In some cases we just treated it as an honour system. We made it clear that the task was intended to take about that much time and that spending more time was not allowed/encouraged.
In reality, we found that good candidates took ~1-2h, and in some cases where candidates spent a lot longer and owned up to it, we found no improvements. In one case a candidate submitted at 3h and then again at 8, and we marked the 8h version 1 mark lower.
When I see instructions that say “This project tests your ability not only to code, but to deal with ambiguity and open-endedness”, it actually means either a) this exercise has been so poorly conceived that we didn’t bother with a rubric or b) the work environment is so chaotic, we never clearly define specs or requirements for anything.
That, and the instruction to simultaneously “show off your skills” and deliver a pragmatic functional solution are completely at odds. Good simple solutions aren’t flashy.
What I want to see is an engineer implement an awkward bit of business logic. Does it become a million nested if statements and a "here be dragons" comment at the top, or do they identify the right patterns and build something that I can reason about when reading the code? This is far more valuable in the job, more signal in the interview, and much harder for AI to get right. It also takes less time.
I've been caught with this few times now. Spend ages trying to coerce AI to solve logic problem and end up just manually solving it myself. Whereas UIs are so good and usually near perfect from first prompt. I suspect it's the weak prompt. I need to learn and solve this before my brain completely atrophies (there must be Anthropic joke here somewhere hehe).
Business logic on the other hand is much more likely to be novel in some way, there are likely fewer similar examples for rules to be learnt from, etc.
Obviously this is all gradations, LLMs can manage some business logic and mess up some UIs (they can't "see" the UI which doesn't help!), but this is my experience of them and fits with my understanding of the technology.
> Good simple solutions aren’t flashy.
Maybe showing off your skills is making a good and simple solution?
Because the interview is meant to measure how well someone would perform on the work?
> You want to get the best signals of ability that you can, and one thing you can do to help that is to make sure that you’ve given an assignment that will be evaluated consistently on your end and understood uniformly by the participants
Well sure, all else being equal, but if the cost of consistency is an assignment that doesn't reflect the actual work environment then that may outweigh the benefit.
Doing two small tests toy can measure each skill independently
A clear coding test to get technical skill and then some in person requirements gathering exercise or something to measure ambiguity handling.
You’ll get better insight into their abilities with less effort for the interviewee AND the interviewer (if the startup is really that chaotic, do you really think they are doing a careful code review on a zillion different bespoke takehomes?)
Because the combination is what matters for the hiring decision, and a single test is a lot easier for everyone than two tests.
> You’ll get better insight into their abilities with less effort for the interviewee AND the interviewer
Disagree. It would always end up being approximately twice as much effort for both.
I mean, what if part of the role that’s being hired for is to help people clearly define the specs and requirements? I consider that a big part of what it means to be a senior software engineer.
Maybe this exact format isn’t the best way to test for it, but I don’t think “we want to see if someone can deal with ambiguity” means all the work is ambiguous. It might just mean all work needs to go through a process to take it from “ambiguous requirements” to “clearly defined specs”
Then I'd expect the interview process to focus on that process, not on the final deliverable. As it stands, the candidate tried to interact with the interviewer by trying to ask for clarification on the requirements, then making a detailed proposal, and got no actionable feedback from either.
I cannot really blame the interviewer for not reminding the candidate that they should actually follow the requirements, in addition to all the optional stuff they mentioned in their spec.
Then they should have responded to his questions in email?
I personally love working on projects that are vaguely defined because it means getting to interact with people and understanding the heart of the problem. My favorite roles have involved reaching out to non-technical people and figuring out how to solve their problem. Often it's not the solution they even initially asked for.
But if your role is to guess about vague specs with no communication, then you're going to fail no matter how senior you are.
Anyways thanks for writing this up OP, it was an interesting read and I am a Kagi customer so I liked learning about them.
Not sure why OP makes no mention of this in their blog post - perhaps they thought those parts were unimportant? In which case I am not surprised at the results.
The project was well made, but my read on it was that they wanted to be shown something interesting. Even if it wasn't as well made of polished, I got the impression they would have preferred something "fun" or imaginative.
I feel sorry for the author to have spent more time on actually doing the assignment after that reply.
During my college days, I had an on-campus interview with Microsoft that served as an assessment for whether I would be eligible for more in-person interviews in Seattle. The interview question was open-ended: “I would like you to design an alarm clock.” It seemed like an unusual open-ended question that prompted me to consider several critical factors, such as the intended audience, physicality, visibility, and audibility. By considering these factors and not immediately presenting a solution, the interview team informed me that I had passed the test. If they had provided me with more specific instructions or guidelines before the interview, they might have missed a signal that was important to them.
Unfortunately, I did not advance to the subsequent rounds at Microsoft. I interviewed during the fall semester. While I made it thru the full process, I was informed that I lacked confidence, but wasn’t a no. I was encouraged to reapply in the spring. The initial experience had left me drained and disheartened, so I decided not to pursue a second attempt. I now deeply regret this decision and wish I had given it another chance. If anyone is in a similar situation during their college years, I strongly advise them to avoid making my mistake. Working at a FAANG company could have changed my entire life and career trajectory.
The problem is not the lack of a "rubric", it is the sheer amount of effort expected from the candidate, especially related to the unprofessionalism of the response. This process is set up to waste a maximum amount of time from candidates without any sort of feedback, and no proof that a reward even existed.
How many dozens of people completed this assignment and got rejected? How many of those assignments were even reviewed by the manager? Did anyone actually get hired? "Giving details would make this less effective for the manager" doesn't begin to excuse this behavior.
Honestly this hiring manager casts a negative light on the entire organization. Do they treat everyone this poorly? Business partners, employees?
I mean, potentially they failed the real test by asking all the questions - Kagi specifically say they're looking for people who can deal with an open-ended project, and instead of just deciding to do something cool, they seem to spend a lot of time demonstrating that they can't deal with open-endedness by asking a lot of questions and coming up with a detailed spec and asking for approval before starting.
That's not to say what Kagi is doing is good, but it's probably for the best for the candidate that they didn't get the job because it sounds like they wouldn't flourish in that kind of environment (which is better to know before starting a job, instead of starting a job you're going to hate and then burning out or failing probation)
* Don't ask clarifying questions: Get failed for making assumptions and not identifying business requirements before implementation
They were failed because they could not deal with the answer, they were not failed for act of asking the question itself.
Actually happens sometimes in my work... Q: "Are there any requirements on the database used?" A: "Nope, just make sure the final system will be able to handle the required load"
If this applies to you, this is probably the best advice anyone can give to you. I was granted an in-person interview with Microsoft as a freshman back in the early 2000s on account of my stellar GPA. They were the company to work at back then. Unfortunately, I didn't solve the brain teaser. Disheartened, I refused to try again even when they invited me to try again the next few years, and I went with an old dinosaur company instead.
I realized my mistake shortly after starting to work at the dinosaur, and clawed my way tooth and nail into a job at Microsoft. It took me 2 years, but it was the single best thing I have done for my career, and changed the course of my life for the better.
If you are asked to implement X and instead you take extra time and come back with X+Y+Z, what have you done? Wasted time e.g. money. Companies really hate wasting money.
So if in your candidate project you demonstrate a propensity for bike-shedding any task, that's gonna be a big red flag.
In the real world, if the time he spent was deemed wasted time, that's management's fault.
Concrete and working? Technically, yes. This would have been an excellent submission for a different assignment and role. But it doesn't seem to suit the specifications for this one.
Then I waited for two weeks, and all I got was a clearly templated response.
The worst part isn’t even the rejection — it’s the vague replies, or no reply at all.It just makes you feel like your time doesn’t matter.
Thank you for writing this. We really do need more people to speak up about these things.
If you're asked to do a take home, I highly recommend confirming that there will be a follow up regardless of the assessment, and if they do not agree to this, do not do the "home work". The honest truth is that most of the teams hiring are of pretty low quality and therefore implementing a good solution is a negative because the team hiring is not at your level (which is a frustrating reason for being rejected).
I'm an early adopter of Kagi and am now planning on cancelling my account over of this. Completely unacceptable. If you don't have time to chat with a candidate about their work, don't ask them to do the work in the first place.
Their solution seems to be nothing like "a minimal, terminal-inspired email client", and OP completely ignored the references to tools they were told to "take inspiration from"
When there is such bad misunderstanding of the requirements, I'd not waste time on the discussion either.
Would any of their emails give a hiring manager idea that the candidate failed to understand the assignment in such a gross way?
Email 1, "What kind of extra feature do you value highly"
Interviewer thinks: "UX improvement could be VI-like megacommands, "pretty UI" must mean creative use of colors and font attributes, privacy-related must be encryption at rest... It's all good, we are happy to look at all of those!"
Email 2, "A webapp with golang accessible online, deployed through AWS using ECS Fargate, with SSL (https), integrated with an email sender provider, with authentication through a login screen, with the ability to send emails through a form, and displaying incoming emails in the user interface."
Interviewer thinks: "OK, that's a lot of implementation details.. Not sure why candidate feels the need to confirm that, but nothing in the list above will be graded as a negative. The important things we care about are that it's inspired by terminal apps like mutt, and that "it should feel fast and intuitive" and one can totally do that using technologies above"
Without seeing the screenshots/mockups, how would one even guess that the candidate was so off?
That’s actually a very valid point. Take-home assignments not only require a significant amount of effort from the person administering them but also from the interviewer (or rather, the hiring team). After investing the time and effort in reviewing a project, it’s reasonable to expect feedback/a response back if requested.
However, we must also acknowledge certain realities. If there are 20 solid candidates for a single open position, many capable individuals will be rejected. This doesn’t imply that they were inadequate or even “failed.” It’s simply a reality of life.
Now to be asked to justify why a hiring manager picked A and not B, legally speaking, cannot be that I had to pick one out of the amazing candidates, so I picked one. The legally correct response (unfortunately) is to get nit picky and find faults where none really exists. At least, that has been my observation in how corporate America likes to operate. And last time I checked, Kagi is based out of Palo Alto.
I would never ask 20 people to do a take-home assignment. There are so many better ways to test team fit before asking someone to commit serious, unpaid, time to a project. Historically speaking a 30 minute chat with someone provides a surprisingly good amount of information to anyone experienced in hiring.
But if you want to commit 20 people to take-home assignments, then block off 20 hours next week for 1-on-1s to chat with them about those assignments. If that sounds like too much, then don't find a better way to filter down the number of people doing homework until it feels manageable.
Why not? Does this phrasing implies any form of illegal discrimination?
But the absurdity of take home work like this is the company feels obliged to keep their requirements secret. Thus, by doing the task not knowing if it will be up to spec, you compromise on your most important skill!
Later on I read the requirements... This person applied to a position named "Email Backend Engineer" but they actually used a third-party product (postmark + turso) for email backend! They also clearly don't think about email too much - the basic stuff, like plaintext email formatting, viewing, and folders (at least inbox + outbox) are simply missing; while there are optional features, like login screen, admin page and backend framework. And backend database does not even containing a email headers map!
That person might be a great engineer, but I don't think they would be a good fit for that specific position. I'd reject them as well.
(A separate question is that hiring manager's second response... We don't do take-home interviews, but I imagine I'd be stumped by a proposal like that, it seems so irregular in a take-home assignment. Still, I can see how the candidate took that response for an approval... perhaps a next candidate would get an extra sentence perhaps something like "actual problem grading would depend on the code quality, number of features implemented, and how close those are to requirements and job description")
Update: read original job description and not just the except from the blog. That person surely omitted some stuff in their blog! the original title was:
"The project is to build a minimal, terminal-inspired email client"
it gave examples:
"Your implementation should take inspiration from existing terminal email tools like aerc, mutt, or even something like himalaya."
wow! that's 100% no hire, serious inability to read the requirements.
Which requirements were not met?
- Email client can either be in the terminal (i.e. a TUI) or a web app
- Should have basic email viewing + sending functionality
Seems like both were more than met to me.
Inspiration from existing tools is subjective. I would have assumed that spending time on the UI for a backend position was not the best way to show off my skills in a take home test.
I agree that "inspiration" can be subjective, but in this particular case the solution was so much off that it'd be hard to argue otherwise. There is nothing terminal-like in it, and the tool is not usable as an email client either. Instead of doing login screens and user management, author should have made a page to view individual email or added folder (just 3, inbox/sent/trash, would already be a great improvement)
And if you want to ignore the requirements and work off position description... the position is titled "Email Backend Engineer", and the candidate's solution offloads actual email operations (storage, transfer) to third-party services. I suspect that even if candidate provided the same UX, but would have backed it with SMTP, IMAP, TCP/IP (not via http library), DNS MX lookup, resilient storage etc... then they might have passed.
But author failed to do either serious front-end work (required by question) or serious back-end work (required by job posting), so result was entirely predictable.
Moreover, this exercise tells you so little about the candidate and their experience. Sure, you know they can code (or did they just use Cursor?) but you have no idea whether they are good and addressing prompts and not at making wise choices. Who cares if the program can send email? What matters is that the client doesn't choke after 10k messages are received or that unicode is handled well: that's the sort of actual challenges you'd be doing at a company like Kagi, not making enormous toy projects.
Edit: Despite that, it seems like a bold choice for the author to build a web app instead of a TUI like the instructions lay out. One could say "terminal inspired" could include web applications but I think that's a stretch.
> Your implementation should take inspiration from existing terminal email tools like aerc, mutt, or even something like himalaya.
Of course the OP in this post did nothing even close to that.
Edit: I've actually checked the full requirements page, and they explicitly say this in "Inspiration":
> Your implementation should take inspiration from existing terminal email tools like aerc, mutt, or even something like himalaya.
Also, the prompt for a terminal client really changes what they're testing! Email web UIs have been a known quantity for years. But the UX of a terminal client is still something that's not "solved." I suspect the rubric for the question has large sections about how they decide to make a terminal client that OP's submission doesn't address at all
This is the real take away. Don't put in outsized effort at companies that are highly subscribed. Everyone prides themselves on being "extremely competitive" and unless it's a FAANG (or well known quiet money fountain like Valve), it's probably not actually worth the effort.
If it's hot on HN, it's highly subscribed -- you just can't expect effort to be valued the same way when there are 10 applicants.
> We normally don’t provide feedback at this stage. We have had other submissions that were simpler and stronger, so we decided to continue forward with these candidates.
This would have been a great place to push and ask for a little more feedback (while being nice as possible since they have nearly no incentive to share more)... How could the other solutions have been simpler and "stronger" (whatever that means? more robust?) -- a few details on what you missed that they were looking for (tests? documentation? CI?) could at least add some value.
All that said -- finding a job is really hard right now. Wish you the best.
This was part of the assignment:
> This project tests your ability not only to code, but to deal with ambiguity and open-endedness, which is essential in R&D projects like Kagi Labs.
It was vague on purpose, they wanted to see how your decision making process goes with what you fill in the blanks with, without needing hand holding. You seemed to ignore this critical piece and went further and further against it with each message.
I cringed hard at the “proposal” he sent them (whyyy) + confusing the hiring manager as some sort of counselor + “will I get the job if I build this?”
Huge misread on OP’s part long before he wrote a line of code.
1 - Too much chatter. Part of the assignment is using judgment and working in ambiguity. I probably would have ran with what was given enough to knock out something small and local in an evening or two. Asking questions is usually fine, they even welcomed it, but seems counter to the original ask.
2 - Writing and sharing a proposal seemed like way overkill. You have to remember that these companies are now getting hundreds if not thousands if not tens of thousands of applicants, that is a lot to deal with if everyone does so. I think it's a bit of a disconnect...you feel like you're going above and beyond and being thorough, they feel like it's being a bit long winded and wasting time. That probably explains the nonresponse.
3 - The finished product seemed functional, but seemed a bit overkill on the infra and polish. This is probably a good thing to work with you, but ended up wasting a lot of your time if not being selected, which was the case.
4 - Maybe I missed something, but the requirement asked for terminal inspired. I'm not quite sure precisely what they meant by that, but didn't see any possible interpretation of that in the result.
Anyways, hope you don't take it too negatively or personally - you obviously are a talented individual and moreso seem to really care about your work. Just wanted to play a little devil's advocate with a different perspective.
The youtube video provided by the OP seems more "web-app", "click driven".
For contrast:
* The OP's submission: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yY1sVXMkP_o
* Someone interacting with aerc: https://youtu.be/kpAwwgnZUxg?t=308
* Someone interacting with mutt: https://youtu.be/C35NRp42bEQ
This is the problem. Your guess is different from the author's guess, because nothing is explicitly stated.
For others who did not click the link, the explicit requirements are:
> - Email client can either be in the terminal (i.e. a TUI) or a web app
> - Should have basic email viewing + sending functionality
> - Can use a fake backend (DB, in-memory, etc) or real IMAP/POP/JMAP/etc backend
> - Does not have to handle rich text messages, just plaintext
> Your implementation should take inspiration from existing terminal email tools like aerc, mutt, or even something like himalaya. It should feel fast and intuitive, and you can choose which email flows you'd like to implement.
The word "keyboard" does not appear. Inspiration from X, Y, and Z is entirely subjective, and you should not be punished for not reading the interviewer's mind.
My takeaway from that is that if you don't make an app that is (quote) "in the terminal (i.e. a TUI)" but choose to make a web app, then it should look at act like a TUI.
1. Spin up an EC2.
2. Install Himalaya.
3. Do some configuration.
Code quality and a sound engineering approach are there.
Personal touches aren’t. Though they look for them, absent domain knowledge they probably don’t want to see them.
Himalaya has documentation and a Github already.
No need to invent the wheel.
Won’t take an unreasonable amount of time.
And looks like a first iteration of a tool.
> Part of the assignment is using judgment and working in ambiguity.
If trying to clarify requirements is not what they wanted here, they may as well ask candidates to pick a number between 1 and 10 and reject anyone who guesses wrong.
> overkill on the infra and polish
I know its an opinion, but hard disagree on both. Take home tests are intended to show off your ability. Without specific guidance, how can anyone guess how much showing off is expected?
Polish is only bad if it stops you from delivering. Rejecting something that was delivered for being "too polished" feels like you are saying someone did too good of a job.
---
In my opinion tests with vague requirements like this are more likely to be a different way of rejecting people who are not a "culture fit".
In this case the alternative was applying to better companies, so I guess in a way the author really did fail the test.
So yes, this is a culture fit test as much (if not more) as a design and coding test. Some people who are great at design and coding would fail it, and it's how this filter is intended to work.
> unless it's a 100x coder who can do "too much" with a lightning speed
"Create a terminal inspired email client so we can do an alpha test with some customers" is a reasonable ask for an engineer at an early stage startup. Of course, there would be a bit more specification, but a lot of the details would still be up to the engineer. This applicant wants more certainty than they can get.
This is illustrated by the line: "I would like to know what kind of response I could expect from Kagi if I drive it to completion." This is not a great request to make. There's no way they can answer that question, because there is no certainty available. They're probably getting a few hundred or a few thousand more submissions to evaluate.
There's no good answer and asking a question like that shows real narcissism imo.
There is usually a separate interview stage with some sort of manager, and those usually have no coding.
I'm sympathetic to how awkward it can feel to provide honest feedback to a candidate, but look: we're all people here. I think we forget that sometimes when we're assembling hiring processes. As a candidate, you need some kind of feedback mechanism that allows you to improve even if you're not a good fit for a particular organization. And if you're involved in the hiring process in any way, you ought to be equipped to handle that.
> you need some kind of feedback mechanism that allows you to improve even if you're not a good fit for a particular organization
This topic has been discussed ad nauseam on HN. In most companies, there is specific company policy that prohibits providing feedback to candidates. There is literally no upside for these companies to provide feedback to candidates that they reject (except Fake/Feel-Good Internet Points, only redeemable on HN forums). Really: There is no way around it, no matter how many tears are spilled about it on HN.
This is the long and short of it.
In the US at least, discrimination laws are expansive. You can -very- easily end up saying something that violates this and putting your company at risk, no matter how good hearted you were attempting to be.
Yes, that sounds like extremely valuable feedback.
Why do you suppose asking a question like that shows narcissism? To me it shows a willingness to infest feedback to improve.
I will add the caveat that if someone asked me that in an interview I would likely give a non-answer because I’m not totally sure what all I’m even allowed to say.
Because I see what happens to my wife when she interviews, and goddamn its brutal.
It's okay to avoid giving feedback if you don't want to. I can think of a few ways to answer that question in a neutral or positive fashion to defuse the situation and legally protect the company.
I do get what you’re saying, but I disagree, there is a good answer; and as is often the case, it’s an honest one.
I interview pretty well, but if I go into an interview with a company that wants hungry hustlers and I've spent the whole interview talking about kindness and team spirit, or if you think I don't know enough pl/pgsql to deal with your gnarly legacy backend, or I'm getting the vibe that none of the engineers seem to like working here, then we need to speak honestly about that.
> we need to speak honestly about that
If they wanted to hire me enough to interview me, but at the end of a half-day of interviewing I'm going to walk away without a job, then they need to rewrite their position description so I know not to apply, deal with their morale problem, or directly ask me how much PL/pgSQL I've done. We both stand to benefit from talking about how the interview went.
I love that the industry has become so poor at gathering requirements that devs are now effectively filtered for their ability to mind read.
This project tests your ability not only to code, but to deal with ambiguity and open-endedness
> And don't hesitate to tell us if you have any questions!
I personally have no problem dealing with "ambiguity and open-endedness" (and, in fact, enjoy it!), but my solution to this problem at every job that has had this issue is: talk to people and understand the problem.
Attempting to "mind-read" is the worst solution to ambiguity, and, in practice, nearly always leads to disaster.
When the client can play with that, the scope can be expanded and additional features can be described.
What they want is someone they can work with. Take home tests are about cultural fit too.
* Can be completed in 30 minutes by a skilled programmer
* Has clear evaluation criteria, both objective and subjective
* Has multiple approaches that require making different tradeoffs
And of course, only give it to some candidates where the result will be make-or-break.
As someone who took one of these broad take-home assignments my last time looking for a job, I failed a the assignment for a job I was overqualified for because I was told I wasn't able to divine what parts of the extremely broad assignment I would be graded on.
I doubt I will be in a position where I get a job that isn't a referral for the rest of my career, but it really turned me off of these kinds of assignments, both taking and giving them.
While writing my questions (and testing in my teammates), I found that "can be completed in 30 minutes by a skilled programmer" very often means "can be completed almost automatically by AI", and that AI will give explanations too, that interviewer could repeat during code review phase.
Work environments that "code first, review later" have been some of the most toxic in my career. It really sucks when you spend days building a feature only to find its not wanted. Which is why explaining the feature in English and getting approvals is the industry standard for shipping projects.
This candidate followed modern software practices that healthy workplaces follow.
(I'm also a hiring manager at a 1k+ engineer company).
But from my experience, the two types look at each other like the other is insane. If you write up an ERD at a scrappy 6 person startup, everyone is going to think you waste time.
Conversely, if you join a larger team with established processes and begin flinging code at the wall unabated, people are going to think you're reckless and possibly inexperienced.
I've worked in places with very strong product management, where every single detail must be approved by a PM. I've also worked in places where engineer has a lot of autonomy - "John from FOO dept is spending too much time wrangling the daily data updates. Can you help him, here is his email? Our higher-ups allocated two weeks for that, but we can extend this if needed." - and from then on, you are in full control of the design and implementation, subject to your team's rules (because no one wants a system with bus factor of 1).
For me, I've found that the latter places are much nicer to work in. The interview question seem to focus on latter situation too.
Exactly. The position they are hiring for is not that of a coder; coding is just one of the skills the position requires, maybe not even the most important.
> (I'm also a hiring manager at a 1k+ engineer company).
>Delivery date: Sunday EOD March 30,
>This is two business days later than the two-week mark since you sent me your first email.
With no accompanying personal reason for the delay, it's already a rejection in my books. The objective was to design an appropriate solution within the deadline.
"Do they want to see if I can build something with as little guidance as possible?"
"Do they want me to push for more requirements like I would on a real project?"
"If I build something cool but totally off from what they expected will that make me look better or worse?"
"Or are they just trying to weed out the people that can't code at all?"
In the end I didn't get a follow-up interview and they refused to give me any feedback on how I could have done better on the take-home assessment.
Back to the OP: One such example would be to do a live code review. This could be done asynchronously or synchronously. It could allow actually talking through topics and issues that relate to the challenges in a real software project. This would allow to surface much more of the knowledge in an experienced software engineer.
I like this idea a lot.
I have been lucky enough to be able to reject take homes. Next time, I might offer to do them for a flat rate of $200/hour but working for free is something I will avoid.
If it’s going to be used as a screening process, at least give clear guidelines and evaluate it pass/fail.
The "simpler" solution part stood out to me though. Given that Kagi was putting little effort into the thing, I wonder if his verbosity/try-hardness might have been a turnoff? Afterall, part of the thing is determining if you want to work with a person, my impression reading his blog post was.. mildly turned off? There was just a bit of desperation to it (which might be from real factors!) but still. That sounds mean and I don't like saying it, that's just kind of the vibe that hit me.
My take on the proposal: the hiring contact is not the person who wrote or will review the prompt. The candidate sent this long message and I doubt the hirer even read it. That's some nativety on the candidate's part, but the company absolutely should indicate "you're overthinking this"
"Oh, I simply refuse to do interviews [of format xyz]. It's just not worth my time..."
I feel like such a worthless piece of crap when I read these. I apply to hundreds of places, and when someone comes along that even wants to talk to me or a miracle happens and I get to any sort of technical round, I simply DON'T HAVE THE OPTION to be turning them away for any reason.
Like, these companies have all the leverage right now, and lots of us have none. Responses like "just tell them no" seem so tone deaf. I guess some of you must be seriously baller, but it seems otherworldly to me.
This is close to how I feel when I read posts on Linkedin "demanding" that companies dispense with some unethical hiring practice (e.g. keeping up job postings for which they are not hiring, rejecting candidates without feedback, endless interview rounds, etc). I'm like, "Dude! The people who are doing this do not give a rat's ass about your preachy Linkedin post. We have no leverage here. Spare me your clickbait."
End of rant.
Companies are abusing their position and we should remember the most egregious of them and avoid them in the future.
In the first file I opened, I got as far as here: https://github.com/Sleepful/mymail/blob/main/app/router/page...
// Create a context variable that inherits from a parent, and sets the value "test".
// Create a context key for the theme.
ctx, err := getEmails(pb, e)
Wording in the second line is not consistent with third.
I’d stop my review there. Lack of attention to detail. Author does not demonstrate an ability to think clearly.
The requirements to spin up and obtain live services (postmark, torso), is a bit much, especially for a take home assignment.
Personally, If your app can’t be spun up and tested with a simple "docker compose up —build", then you are doing something wrong.
My rule of thumb for take home assignments: if I spend more than a few hours on it. Then I am probably over delivering and need to rethink approach and remove shit I don’t need. There’s no way in hell I’m spending a full working day, let alone a _week_ of free labor for these assignments.
Note: also not a fan of "take home assignments" either. Of the few companies that ask for these, I consequently ask to be compensated for my time. Only 1 company agreed to compensation, but others declined and I moved on.
"I would like to know what kind of response I could expect..." - This is also established from the beginning: you can expect either a "Looks good, let's do some interviews" or a "Sorry, not interested," based on the code you submit. They can't narrow down the choices prior to your submission, because they're grading your submission, not your proposal document with an extensive list of details that they already told you they're mostly ambivalent to.
"So it is funny that my project is so weak, yet it made them update the guidelines to something stricter." - Main character syndrome. As someone who has been on the other side of these kinds of reviews, the far more likely explanation is that they kept getting submissions where the build instructions didn't work (which is not disqualifying by itself; the authors may not be on the same OS as the reviewers) and they got tired of spending time dealing with it.
Ultimately, the failure here was not a technical one but a social one. The author tried very hard to do the thing that it seemed like they were asking for, not the thing they actually wanted. The hiring manager's unwillingness to engage with the proposal doc was itself a form of communication that they were not interested in this level of detail, it was just an implicit one.
It's common for engineer types to want all that kind of communication to be explicit, and I have a lot of sympathy for those folks, but the reality is that teamwork is a skill, and the ability to suss out what a stakeholder actually wants, but isn't saying due to incomplete information and/or office politics, is a reasonable thing to select for. The ambiguity of the prompt is a feature, not a bug: it's kept the author away from a company whose communication style they're not compatible with.
(that said, this project does sound excessively complex for a take-home)
What if there are 300 other applicants? What's to disincentivize giving all of them the assignment even when there's only one open position? There is no guarantee that anybody will even clone your repository.
In a live coding interview, the company is committing valuable engineering resources to evaluate you. You have some assurances that they actually want to hire someone and not just get free labor or waste your time.
Furthermore, if they are even the kind of company that thinks they're so special they can or should even ask for that, then it proves they're the kind of people I want to avoid like the plague to begin with. So when I'm asked to do a homework assignment it's actually a huge time saver for me, because it tells me right up front to avoid them.
All developers should refuse this. But there are always enough that are so desperate they'll do pretty much anything.
When good companies are trying to hire engineers, they don't hire based on skill alone. They also try to hire based on how a person performs given certain constraints like time and ambiguity.
Sharing a proposal and asking for more time was probably the polar opposite what they were looking for
I think a lot of product managers prefer to see simple, fast solutions to a take home assignment. Understandable and turned in on time.
Look at all the third party services he uses! Nobody sane would pick that solution. That would be a completely maintainment nightmare.
He did not write an email client, he wrote a wrapper to some email client, which handles all the heavy lifting.
At the very least, write something that interact with a real (or fake) SMTP server. Other things are just cherry on top.
As someone who works at a university this is very reminiscent of students who don't understand the assignment then complain when they get an unexpected mark.
What do you want to achieve here, is this a throwaway prototype or would a user ever see this? Am I going to get picked on for imperfect UX or do you just want to see something. It becomes an exercise in guessing the reviewers sensibilities.
Either someone had a vision and is saying ‘Read my mind’
The alternative explanation seems to be, there is no vision, and the interviewee needs to define it.
In either scenario, the amount of communication, feedback, specificity, lack of respect for the power dynamics is appalling.
Anyway: I don't think homework assignments are a valuable mechanism for filtering out candidates. Setting aside shoulds and shouldnots and the ethics of it and everything else, it simply provides a really poor signal for the value of a potential candidate.
Especially today, when something like this particular assignment could just be pasted into any of the popular LLMs and returned as completed within a couple hours.
If an organization wants to hire developers that can take vague project descriptions and convert them into code that may or may not do whatever was in the heads of the people that wrote the project description, then (a) that's a bad practice, but (b) it would be better for everyone involved if you handled this over a video call. If your staff are too busy to do a small pile of video calls with potential candidates over a couple of weeks, then they are too busy to properly onboard a new candidate and you should probably just pack it in. (i.e., they are not too busy to do this.)
If the goal is to hire somebody that knows IMAP, SMTP, POP, etc. inside-and-out and can crank out RFC-compliant code without using any of the third-party libraries that already exist for this sort of thing, then the assignment description should have asked for that.
Homework assignments are an unfortunately common practice, but worst of all, most of them are carelessly designed.
That would have been significantly more in line with what the interviewer was looking for and would have produced better results. It’s a take home test. Use the tools at your disposal.
Second - this is the wrong approach. Nothing wrong with writing a small doc. Write it, then implement the necessary features (terminal inspired client that can read and send email), and test it. Literally a cli for read and send, tack on curses or use imgui. Do IMAP/POP/SMTP or emulate it. The job position is for a backend role in the email team.
Tack on bells and whistles later.
Case-in-point: Modern job sites (cough LinkedIn). Every job listing has HUNDREDS of applicants within an hour of the job being posted. It's ridiculous. It should not be _that_ easy to apply for a job.
The outcome is what we are seeing today: A company posts a job, is inundated with 100s/1,000s of applications. In order to filter out the 80% of applicants who aren't deeply interested in the role, the company deliberately assigns busywork/road blocks to slow down the process.
The other 20% of applicants will then spend days/weeks/months in the hiring process on intro videos, take home challenges, etc. Basically anything that can be throw at the applicant that isn't time with a human.
The takeaway for each can be broken down into:
- 80% of applicants: didn't spend anything, didn't get anything, don't care
- 19% of applicants: spent time doing some/all of the busywork, _aren't_ hired, end up very frustrated at the amount of time/energy/resources that was spent only to be discarded
- The 1%: spent time doing some/all of the busywork, _are_ hired, feel great!
I'm not sure what the exact solution is, but I know that:
a) it's a race to the bottom (with the bottom being full automation on BOTH sides of the hiring process),
b) I'd much rather spend a fair bit of time putting together applications for 5 jobs and be seriously considered than spend very little time on 50 jobs only to be immediately rejected or handed an assignment before I even talk to a real human being
c) hiring teams hate the status quo, too.
In this case, I perceive that the author (Jose) was looking for firm requirements, and did what he could to elicit them, but the Kagi folks were just looking for innovation and a demonstration of competency. They didn't care as much about the details of the submittal as they did about seeing what the candidate would do without specific requirements.
But having said this I would have likely rejected the author too. Kagi Search is a startup, these folks are typically looking for fast moving, pragmatic optimists who can strike the breadth - depth balance.
We used to have a colleague. They would collect the inputs, close themselves for a few days, come up with a solution only to learn that reqs changed in the meantime. It was not pleasant experience for anyone.
Remember kids "just say no"
Your solution is the same old thing thousands of others could produce. They want more than a programmer that knows some languages, tools and libraries.
I think they might give you 10 more minutes of their consideration if you simply produced a command-line program in Go that used sockets to talk protocols to servers.
To work in a startup you have to embrace the "just do it" mindset, you have a brain to fill the gaps, and you can always iterate later. I’d be more interested in getting the result of the take home quickly, obviously in a working state, but with a documentation explaining trade offs because of lack of time, ideas for future improvements, design choices, stuff not included (ie. a pretty UI) etc.
My take: they’re literally asking for a CRUD (if you decouple well, you can easily replace the DB with SMTP/IMAP later) with basic email features: send (to, cc, bcc), fetch, reply, reply all, transfer. That’s it, you can do it in 2 hours. Add folders, signatures, "send later", authentication, or whatever if you want to show off.
austin-cheney•4h ago