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.
I have a map of topics and questions, and I get the candidate chatting about their past projects, their approach, and what they liked/disliked about past projects and various technology they've used.
It takes a maximum of one hour and usually close to about thirty minutes to make a yes/no decision on a candidate (sometimes it only takes ten minutes to make a no decision, and then it's a matter of trying to politely end the interview).
I've interviewed hundreds of candidates this way over the years, and everyone I've hired has been capable of doing the job. Not once have I ever had to let someone go for lack of technical ability.
Part of the problem is that we don't train people how to conduct interviews, and another part is "this is how I was interviewed, so this is how I'm going to interview other candidates" -- pure inertia.
As an industry, we really need to do better.
As for the OP, _if_ I had been administering a vague take-home project that had a 1-week delivery deadline, and a candidate peppered me with Qs and then presented a full proposal for the project for approval, prior to working on it... I would have rejected them. But I'm pretty certain I would have decided to reject them in my regular 30-60 "chat" interview, and I would not have moved on to the take-home project and wasted their time like that. So, again, I fault the interviewer(s) for not being able to filter candidates efficiently.
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?
If it came from a friend or chatGPT, you'll learn that quickly because you can ask them stuff like "show me how you're implementing FOO. OK, if the requirements change, and now we need to BAR, what do you need to change across the app?" If they wrote the code and understood the task, they should understand what needs to change, how to do it, etc, and you can do that part with them live. Maybe someday LLMs will be fast enough that you can't catch someone constantly waiting for the AI to help them, at least as of May 2025 we're not there yet.
If they didn’t write it themselves, they will absolutely fail in the follow-up session where the real evaluation happens and I ask them to scale the code, handle crash safety without using transactions, etc.
(Even moreso if it's a fizzbuzz level task, I'd have thought - actual fizzbuzz being famous as a coding interview task, after all.)
Would you think doing this live in a screen sharing session adds more value? How would you prepare the candidate for this?
> Would you think doing this live in a screen sharing session adds more value?
In my experience, hugely yes. Above all else I really like that the time commitment is fixed on both sides - no homework for the candidate, and we're not asking them to invest any more time than we are.
Also doing things interactively gives a lot of leeway for adjusting and avoiding wasted time. If somebody's got one section basically solved, I might cut in and say "yeah that bit is great, let's call it finished and look at this other bit". If they're obviously having a lot of trouble, I might ask about their current work and maybe switch tasks if there's a better fit. Or if they're obviously coasting easily I might cut in with "how would you scale this?" questions that give more signal than watching them finish up the loose ends.
Another thing I like is that we can keep the task specification simple, like what you'd get from a PM, and it's up to the candidate whether they want to ask questions or jump in. I imagine that with take-home tasks you either need to give out pretty specific requirements, or else have people interpreting the task a variety of different ways.
> How would you prepare the candidate for this?
We explain at the beginning that the goal is write code for an hour and watch how they work, and there's no hard requirement for what needs to be finished by the end. And they're welcome to search the web, use AI, or anything else they'd typically do while working.
And I've only done a few dozen of these, but personally I've never seen anybody get particularly nervous. I think nerves are a bigger issue with HR style "pass all the tests within the time limit" tests, where the danger is that somebody can hit a wall and never get past it. That doesn't happen with my format, because if somebody is stuck I just give them hints until they're unstuck (since I get no signal from watching somebody scratch their head).
So I have to wonder, is this a junior position, or did too much hadoop rub off on me a decade and a half ago?
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.
I have to be blunt, you have no idea what you are talking about. I am just going to say this: A terminal app is completely at odds with an online web client. If the interviewer is as clueless as you are, that explains two things:
- I was never going to pass the interview in the first place
- I was never going to get a reasonable conversation from this person, no amount of communication is going to solve incompetence from the interviewer's side
Corollary:
- Gross negligence from the company for assigning this interviewer
Nothing "at odds" here.. You can absolutely have fixed-size font, character grid based layout, and keyboard-based navigation.
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.
You can absolutely have terminal-inspired web apps, see http://www.coboloncogs.org/
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.
- Title: Make something fun for the customer.
Then your performance review:
- Manager: We cannot tell you why, but you failed at your job.
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.
Somehow the only criticism I got is that it was not simple enough.
Perhaps the moral of the story is that many managers have no idea what the word "simple" implies in terms of software.
This is a classic situation:
Engineer gets asked to implement the "do what I mean" button by some manager, this is a magic button that when pressed will do whatever the manager wants at that moment. The manager acts shocked when they are told that this is not a simple request to fulfill. The manager thinks: "I am being tricked! I merely asked for a single button!"
That is often a problem with proposals/design docs in general. In the real job, if proposal is actually required, it would be sent it back with "please add details on UX and how you are going to store email headers". In this case, the proposal was explicitly _not_ required though, so interviewers did not want to ask for more details on the optional document. They checked what was written there, found no problems, and approved it.
No wonder he focused on backend part.
So from the interviewer's standpoint, author was asking about few details of implementation, like "can I use third-party service for email storage?"; and the response was of course "yes, you can" (because assignment was pretty clear that backend does not need to be advanced or even present, and that it's UI that matters)
I guess the question worked as intended, and filtered out candidate who cannot even read the simple requirements.
(The amount of effort was disproportional though, but I am not sure how to solve this in take-home context without discriminating against people who have busy schedules and/or work slowly)
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?
Really? My email states explicitly why I want to confirm that:
> I would like to know what kind of response I could expect from Kagi if I drive it to completion.
Are you forgetting that the entire transaction implies a lot of work for the candidate?
Are you forgetting that candidate is doing this to land a job?
Do you think the candidate is writing a design document just for fun?
Your subtext implies that I should have guessed the grading, which is quite mind-blowing.
Remember, the instructions mention a web app as an option, the role is for a web-based company, and if my design document did not meet any of the key aspects they could have brought it up and rejected my proposal.
The assignment had exactly 1 line about actual back-endy stuff: "Can use a fake backend (DB, in-memory, etc) or real ..."
Now, what did your email asked for? There was a whole bunch of things about back-endy stuff, and exactly 1 (one) sentence about the user-visible things, the thing they cared about the most:
"The UI will be kept simple, showing pagination for sent and received emails. In addition to the requirements of the assessment, there will be a login screen and two accounts"
So maybe you intended this to be a complete design document, but it actually was not. This is because it did not actually did contain any parts the interviewer cared about. And that's one of the reasons why you got no feedback - you could do _anything_ for the backend and they would likely still accepted that, they simply did not care if you used Pulumi or terraform or "start.sh" or "docker compose up"
And no, you don't need to guess the grading, you just need to read the assignment carefully. What do they seem to want? What kinds of things do they mention a lot? What kind of things do they mention in passing?
> That is part of the assessment itself, see what kind of extra features you can come up if any
It seems like the author wanted to hear something more like "ok, here’s a list of things we want you to implement, and here’s mock-ups for the UI, and here’s the API spec you can follow". How I’m reading the HM’s response is - I should spend a few minutes trying out the email clients they mentioned or watching videos on them, and come up with a list of their features. Apply my own judgement to say which ones are most important and roughly estimate the time it will take to implement a PoC for the assignment. At this point you could take that to the HM and say "hey, I think I can do X, Y, Z features within the timeframe. I’d like to have W, U, V, features in the client but I think they’re less important and I won’t have time. Since this is a backend position I will focus on the API and the client will be a thin wrapper around that. Does that sound good?". They will probably say yes and maybe throw in a "when you do X feature think about users that have 100k unread emails in their inbox", and you’ll get a gold star for "dealing with ambiguity". If I was the HM I would expect some amount of back and forth like this. Since the guidelines are so broad you can focus in on the areas you are most familiar with and keep the rest super simple. As far as we know the author sent the one email on March 18 including a lot of details about what dependencies they were going to use but no product or clarifying questions after that, which the HM might have happily answered. They also both went past the deadline set by the company AND their own self-imposed later deadline from their own proposal.
At the end of the day this is a startup and so it makes sense that what they’re looking for is someone who can work independently. They won’t have a PM to come up with the spec and list of requirements for you every time, and an architect who hands you the perfect software design, and they need you to be able to apply your own judgement and look ahead so that if you are designing their backend and 6 months down the line users ask for drafts support, you don’t come back with "sorry I didn’t account for drafts in my data model because no one told me, we can’t support that without redoing the whole thing".
It sounds like this actually worked fine as a filter for both the author and the company, just that the author realized too late in the process that this was not the work environment they were looking for. A phone screen or whatever else would've just been additional time spent for both the company and the author. I also don't think it's the company's fault that the author put in a "full work week" of hours, as far as we can tell that was never the expectation.
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?
And yet, the role is still advertised 1.5 months after my rejection, which means they are still getting emails from new candidates applying for the role. Do you suppose they get so many competent candidates that they can't make a decision on whom to hire?
At this point we can only speculate about their intentions, because the intentions are definitely not transparent.
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.
Plenty of comments here have strong, but conflicting, opinions about which set of features are obviously in or out of scope. That alone indicates to me that this is a badly worded take home test.
Even ignoring that, the author told Kagi exactly what they were going to do in advance.
Applicant: I'm going to spend a week building X
Kagi: Sounds great!
Applicant: After a week, I have built X
Kagi: Not at all what we are looking for. Rejected.
I don't see any way to interpret this interaction positively.
Both can be true (they arguably did too much extraneous stuff, but didn't do what they were actually asked for).
Mind you, this is a pretty ridiculous take-home question, and I'm sure they lose plenty of good candidates to "life is too short" at this point.
If only 10 candidates applied, take home could be a 5 min task. If 50 apply, you need something that will leave only those that are really commited to working at Kagi and ready to go an extra mile (and we may be looking for resourcefulness and determination as desireable traits, given how ambitious and difficult Kagi's core mission is).
anyway, the exchange went like this:
Kagi: "please build terminal-inspired email client, you can choose which email flows you'd like to implement."
Applicant: I am going to spend a week building it, using golang, AWS, TMPL etc... I am also going to fit it onto 2 html pages.
Kagi: Sounds great!
Applicant: After a week, I have built something using golang, AWS, TMPL etc.. It has nothing to do with terminal, and does implement any of the email flows completely.
Kagi: Not at all what we are looking for. Rejected.
I don't see any way to blame Kagi for that exchange. Who would have thought the candidate decided to ignore half of the requirements?
I get it that it's not always realistic to do, especially if the hiring manage reviews hundreds of applications for a hot role. But that's why take home assignment sucks. Some candidates may waste hours of their lives for nothing. Both sides need to be respectful of other people's time.
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.
Your assumption is that a better font-choice and some CSS would have made the difference for a back-end role.
While we are talking, I was actually always wondered about candidate responses like that...
There is that spec, which starts with "minimal, terminal-inspired email client", and contains specific references to the products you want to imitate. Line 3 even explicitly says "Can use a fake backend", and to me, this shows pretty clearly that they don't care about backend, they need UI.
And then there is your submissions which basically has no UI to speak of. It's not even "minimal", as the basic features (like new mail indicator) are missing. Also, in no possible world you can call this "terminal inspired", it's 100% generic web app.
How on earth did you expect this submission to work, given the assignment they sent you?
Did you just skip over the original page and then forgot about it immediately?
Or did you read it, decided that "terminal-inspired web pages cannot possibly exist" and proceeded to implement completely different thing? In that case, why didn't you mention this in email ("and btw, I am going to ignore the part where you said I should build terminal-inspired email client because I think it's stupid.")
Or maybe you read the requirements, and randomly declared half of them "useless fluff" and decided not to implement them?
What was your thought process?
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
The hiring manager above thought it was too polished, but you think it is not polished enough.
> There’s no drafts. No CC or BCC field. No folders or labels (including sent or trash!). No replies. No threads. No shortcuts. There’s not even an indication of whether an email has been read or not. In terms of features it is very very very barebones
None of these were asked for. Your guess as to what the true requirements are completely different from the authors, and others in this comment section.
Everyone seems to have different opinions on why the author failed. No one should have their time wasted on a take home test destined to be rejected because they guessed wrong.
And in this case, the author explicitly asked if they were on the right track before spending time on the test. Kagi had the opportunity to reject early or nudge the author back in the expected direction. Instead they wasted everyone's time.
I don't see how this can be interpreted in a positive way.
"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.
This has always felt like an excuse used by people who who just don't want to be caught in their own lies when asked to come up with a real, non-discriminatory reason.
I bet you this comes back to insurance, as many things do in the corporate world. Sufficiently large companies probably have insurance coverage for discrimination lawsuits, or at least employment disputes in general. The coverage probably costs less if you have a "no feedback" policy.
Say you say it was for failure to meet a specific performance standard (because that is the documented reason); then the ex-employee has a starting point for an discrimination claim by looking for evidence that trnds to support the claim that people who differ on some protected-from-discrimination axis who failed to meet that standard were not fired. No reason given, no starting point. In theory, this policy helps make false nuisance claims more work and less likely, but a substantive reason for it is that HR knows that they cannot eliminate all prohibited acts by managers that would create liability, so making it harder to get a starting point for gathering evidence is important to prevent valid claims from materializing. HR policy does not exist to protect employees from unlawful treatment, it exists to protect the company from liability for such treatment. Sometimes thise two interests align, but when it comes to information about firing decisions they do not.
There’s similar things that can be done with other prohibited reasons for dismissal, loke retaliation; but the idea is any information you give makes it easier for them to make a case against you.
This is also, in reverse, why, as a departing employee (whether departing voluntarily or not), you should never participate in an exit interview or, if you must as a condition of some severance or other pay or benefit, never volunteer any information beyond the bare minimum necessary; one significant purpose of such interviews is to document information useful either for potential claims against you or to defend against any potential claims you might have, including those you have not yet discovered, against the company.
As one pointed out, there's a "well you said it was X, but person Y who got hired did that too. And they're a different race or gender or religion, so that leads me to believe discrimination."
There's also you trying to be helpful, saying something along the line of "well you hesitated a bit and sounded unsure in your answers", only to find out they have some disability that caused that and now have admitted you're discriminating based on it.
Maybe you'll say "well, if I had known, I wouldn't have noticed it or cared." And a lot of candidates would likely say as much up front. But they don't have to tell you about it at all. See how that creates a weird dynamic?
Is it common? Probably not. But it obviously happened or else such rules wouldn't exist. It's one of those things that the bad actors ruin it for everybody. Bigots are never going to admit their reasons - good people will. But bad people will always try to take advantage, regardless.
There is widespread resentment of this and many other common hiring practices in the tech sector, and that is further impacting both the quality of candidates as well as employee motivation and satisfaction. The upside for companies is higher quality candidates whose first experience with the company is a hiring process that makes the candidate want to work there.
Companies have been optimizing for candidates that are an immediate ideal cultural and technological fit. They are all competing for candidates that are the idealized developer, with perfect social skills, a brilliant CV, and deep technical experience that is an exact match for whatever the company is doing at the moment.
That's fine and rational and all, but a necessary consequence of this is that that pool is quite small and there are lots of companies competing for those people. Meanwhile, there are a lot of very good candidates who are underemployed because they aren't getting the opportunity or resources needed to become those idealized employees. This is a game theory outcome where both parties are optimizing themselves into a losing position.
I've been employed in this industry, off and on, for a long time. I assure you that companies didn't always behave this way. There has been a clear, obvious, and severe decline in the hiring experience, and these policies are hurting the entire industry.
It's generally socially frowned-upon to go on a couple of dates with someone and then ghost them. It happens, but it's not considered good practice. We recognize that it's cruel but also leads to a more cynical, detached, overall worse dating experience for everyone. Saying "I don't think this will work out, you seem nice but you're not what I'm looking for right now" is difficult and awkward, but it's also a necessary skill that needs to be maintained. Sometimes people don't react well, but that doesn't make it less necessary: it closes a feedback loop that ultimately allows earnest people who are looking for relationships to learn and grow and become better candidates for the next relationship.
Do you not code review? Are you a rubber stamp "LGTM" shop that should just be pushing to main but cargo culted the ceremony because github has it built in?
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.
I broke it down for them. "This was nothing to do with you, and we would have had no objection to hiring you. However, the candidate who beat you out simply had more domain experience in XYZ area" and went on to say "For what it's worth, we had 500+ applications, of which we in-depth reviewed 100 resumes, had 40 first-round interviews, 15 second-round, and three final round."
They emailed me back to express appreciation and that though this didn't work out, it renewed their confidence to know they didn't "mess something up".
Since then, if we're at that point in a process and I'm rejecting you, I'll at least give you something to work with.
People, being humans and prone to pattern seeking, assume that if they didn't get the job, it's something specific they did, or failed to do.
And sometimes, that's true. But for a lot of candidates, it just came down to another candidate being slightly better, or slightly cheaper, or some combination of value markers.
A lot of my interview feedback comes down to "I don't see any reason you wouldn't be a good fit, but we have other interviews and it's going to come down to value."
Some people will take this as me saying "Don't ask for what you're worth," or "we're gonna low-ball your salary." The reality is, we're a business, and if I can produce the same widget with person X or person Y and person X costs 10K less a year, I'm going with person X. Every time.
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.
Like suppose they do hate their job. Do you expect them to speak that plainly and honestly to every candidate who asks "So how do you like working here?" and risk getting that posted to the front page of HN?
You're asking them to risk their own livelihood so you get a better signal for your own job search, that doesn't seem like a proportional trade to me.
Obviously I'm not advocating for complete opaqueness, but your interviewer is hardly ever in a good position to part with their true feelings towards questions like "How did I do compared to other candidates? How is it truly working here?"
I've basically almost always given direct and obvious non-answer to the first question: "I cannot tell you right now, because I'll need to write down and collate my thoughts. And I'm not allowed to share feedback directly, so your recruiter will be in touch with the feedback afterwards."
Precisely the opposite. Asking for criticism and genuinely being interested in what others think of you with the goal of taking the feedback on board and improving is the polar opposite of typical narcissistic behavior. As far as I'm aware that sort of self-reflection is inherently incompatible with NPD.
If my interviewer stumbled over this it would be a red flag.
Nobody is getting a few hundred or few thousand submissions to evaluate. Nobody. If you are getting 1k applicants, at best 50 are asked to do a take-home and even then, not all at once.
If by some miracle 100 people did this to completion at the same time, there should be a notice to the effect that due to high volume, blah blah blah.
The author may have had issues (I personally don’t count “need clear instructions” as an issue - edit - I see they didn’t adhere to the TUI prompt), but the hiring manager definitely did.
It's meant for the person for whom it's ideally an afterthought. Tough reality.
I agree that the hiring manager could have handled it much better, but as a rule: If at any point during any hiring process you feel like you need to spend even close to a full time week of work on anything without being very explicitly told so, you are wrong.
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.
It's kind of up to what you're filtering for, and how much you trust the candidate at that part of the process, and how you follow up after hiring.
But we want the person to use AI, so what is a 30 minutes session?
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.
If the next guy puts in 10 hours, and you only put in 1 hour, assuming equal skill. Which project will be more polished?
If you are high skill and only work 1 hour on the project, but a newbie puts in 10 hours with ChatGPT's help, I'd be the newbie would have a pretty competitive project to the skilled 1 hour candidate.
The person that got the offer coded 1-2 more extra features than I could in that time. What am I supposed to tell the interviewer?
"You're not supposed to get a polished project?"
If you're the interviewer, are you going to hire the guy that did just was asked or you are going to hire the guy that worked nights and weekends to get the perfect project delivered to you beyond what was asked?
I've worked with IMAP and POP libraries before so am familiar with the fundamentals for building a client and libraries in many languages make this part of the integration very straightforward. Couple that with a "modern" CLI library this should come together very quickly. And I would not have included half a dozen cloud services for a terminal like email client. The project submitted completely missed the mark and they still have no idea why.
If I wanted to create something by meticulously planning out every detail and spoon feeding them to a code monkey with no creative input I'd just use an LLM or outsource to India where you've got to spell out every little detail and still get questionable results back. I've had to do that plenty of times and I don't want to work like that. I want to work with other professionals who can run with a concept and deliver good results without constant oversight and micromanagement. That's clearly not the author of the blog post.
The issue isn't his solution is incorrect. The issue is the company's said his solution was correct and then they rejected him anyways.
This is the equivalent of the interviewer telling you the brute force solution on a leetcode is good enough, but then rejecting you after the interview.
The company said that _the parts he wrote in the doc_ would not negatively affect his scoring. But his doc did not contain many parts that the company cared about - read it yourself, and try to answer the questions like: Will there be a per-email indicator? Is there a "sent mail" folder? How will user be notified of incoming email?
More on this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43996105
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).
When I worked at unprofitable, small startups, a lot of mental energy was lost due to miscommunications before the MR review process. Eg an engineer would be tasked to complete a project, but misunderstood a critical component and only after n-days of work was this identified and corrected.
Only ever heard it referred to as FAANG before
Process is healthy at large companies, because they move slowly and communicating your changes often becomes far more important than the actual code that needs to be written. Kagi is a small company. It does not make sense to cargo-cult practices from a company a hundred times larger.
lol, this makes me very old school but I suffered jobs where that was the outcome of months if not years of my work!
>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.
From my understanding of the post, this was the initial screening phase as it was in response to OP's application. In other words, this is what every candidate who passes the application screen (the weakest one) is sent.
Let's say they have 100 candidates for this role. A proper code review here should take ~45 minutes to an hour. Even 15% of the candidates requesting a full code review - regardless of synchronicity - represents a 11.25-to-15 hour time commitment from the hiring team. For the initial screen. That is asinine. No proper organization would accept such a large time sink for so few candidates at this phase.
As I've said already multiple times in this thread, OP very clearly does not understand the asynchronous relationship at play here, and then based much of their interactions & interpretations on this misunderstanding.
From reading the other comments, it seems like there are a lot of mind-readers among us. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Yes, there were flaws in the assignment and communication with the company, but there were also flaws in your approach. You’d be better off to try to take away some lessons here rather than blaming everyone but yourself.
Frankly, if I were you I’d consider deleting both your comments here and the blog post. I don’t think they reflect well on you as a candidate for future roles.
That would be a wise move at this point. I keep wondering what the point of the post was?
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"
Not to mention that the whole problem is that the fucking hiring manager was too slimy to actually go to the technical team and ask them what they think about the proposal, and too lazy to take the time and energy and answer like a normal sentient being, and instead sent this autoresponder-level bullshit reply.
(OP outsourced the actual "email backend", that is the thing that stores and sends/receives emails, to a third-party products. Probably not the wisest solution if you are trying to get hired to work on email backends :) )
Just reading the thread is obvious that the requirements were sufficiently vague -- which, again, is not necessarily a problem -- but going about this in a very disrespectful way is not.
(And yes, of course, the hiring manager always can say that "oh I did not want to reject them before they sent the finished assignment, because they could have surprised us with their code!" -- which, while technically true, but I think simply showcases the absolute uncaring laziness that we see from many companies.)
> The UI will be kept simple, showing pagination for sent and received emails. In addition to the requirements of the assessment, there will be a login screen ...
How would you reply to that?
One option is to tell them that the document looks fine, but also add that it does not actually describe the parts they are going to grade on (such as: "which part of aerc/mutt is does author imitate?"). But this is a bad idea, because the likely reaction of candidate is to spend even more time on spec... and the assignment is not about writing specs, the specs are not in the rubric, and you don't want to waste candidate's time on asking for docs you don't care about.
Another option is to tell them: "This spec is so bad, I don't think you can possibly pass. Bye-bye!". This is even worse, as it can potentially reject good candidates who are just bad at writing documents - and there are plenty of them.
So I think responding: "Looking forward to receiving your submission." is the pretty OK answer.
(I suppose the in the non-interview settings, if this was a junior engineer, I'd might also add something like "And don't forget to make the pages you write be terminal-inspired, as the requirements say, see videos of people using [aerc], [mutt] and [himalaya]" - but I can see why this was not said in the interview. After all, testing that the candidate can read and comprehend a tiny requirements doc is a part of the interview)
In my interpretation the "righteous indignation" part is that the candidate tried to make sure that they are not ending up wasting their time and not chasing some pipe-dream (which is bad for both parties after all, leaves a sour taste in the candidate's mouth, and ... apparently does not further the good reputation of Kagi), yet ... that is exactly what ended up happening, because the fucking ~~money lenders in the temple~~ hiring mangers in the corposphere are not just useless individually, but are actively harmful as a cohort.
(Of course, the people deciding to hire hiring managers usually have good reasons to do so. And companies are not expected to babysit every candidate, but since almost always the power dynamics favors them they ought to be the more generous and proactive in the transaction. But at this point in the analysis we are just a few steps from declaring that it's cough late-stage capitalism's cough fault.)
Imagine yourself in the hiring manager's place. Assume all you know nothing about the candidate, and all you have is this email he posted in the blog.. How would you respond to it? Keep in mind you have no idea that the candidate is going to ignore all the requirements, you have not seen the product yet.
And I expect more from professional hiring facilitators.
I would tell them to write more about the UI/UX, do a mockup whatever. Emphasize that the people doing the evaluation looove TUIs so anything web starts with a bit of a handicap, etc.
"I would tell them to write more about the UI/UX, do a mockup whatever." is effectively changing the take-home task from "write code", to "write spec, including mockup, get it approved, and then write code". This can be a valid skill, depending on position - but it also means that applicants waste their time on the writing documents that are not part of grading rubric.
And this brings us to a second part: "Emphasize that the people doing the evaluation looove TUIs..." - this is giving a really big hint. It would be a valid response _if the goal was to get this particular candidate_, say because unethical recruiter is getting paid for each candidate placed, and does not care about Kagi's own needs. But does Kagi (or anyone else, really?) want the kind of candidates that could not even parse out the simple doc? Because they were not subtle about loving TUIs in the requirements, mentioning them multiple times and giving examples.
So I am pretty sure that these kinds of strong hints would be against the interview rules, and there is no "fuckup" in this regard.
If I were to write those replies... I don't actually know their policy about how much help can they give to candidate over email.
If reviewing intermediate docs is too much, I'd have to refuse the candidate firmly: "Reviewing documents mid-assignment is against a spirit of this question. Please write the code using the best understanding of the assignment, and I am looking forward to receiving your submission."
If reviewing those docs is OK, I'd say something mildly encouraging - as the document as sent is not wrong, it's just incomplete. "This document contains no glaring defects"? "I can imagine a passing submission that would follow the plan outlined in this document"? "The results will depend on quality of implementation and how well you've followed the assignment, but so far I see no blockers"? "I cannot promise anything until I see the code, but that can potentially lead to passing assignment"?
Some of those would be better than "This is all very exciting. Thanks for keeping me updated" -- but looking at the candidate, would this make a difference? Judging by the tone of the post, and how he decided to proceed because "this is somewhat of a positive answer", even those harsher responses would end up the same way.
"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.
Even after asking for all this clarity, he failed to do what was originally asked. If asking for all those details, you have to at least do the basics of what was asked.
He failed on multiple fronts here, and even wrote an entire blog post without realizing it. It seems like Kagi did the right thing by not hiring him, if we’re being brutally honest. If he would re-read the original ask with a fresh set of eyes, then look at his final product and all the communication, the feedback should go without saying. When someone misses the mark by that much, it’s takes a lot of effort to try and say it nicely to soften the blow, as a company would want to do. Multiply this by however many people applied, and there just aren’t enough hours in the day.
Now that he’s written this blog post, I wonder if he’ll have more trouble even getting past the first gate of hiring processes, as other companies won’t want to sign on to have a blog post trying to drag them through the mud over a rejection. That shows more questionable judgement.
Had the hiring manager given detailed feedback, it would have ended up in the blog post, and then they would need to revamp their process, as anyone reading would get additional information they weren’t intended to have.
I’ve also seen situations like this where the person never stops responding and seems to try and turn a rejection into a long term mentorship opportunity. The author seems like they might have those tendencies and keeping to standard boilerplate responses helps avoid that. It’s not overly personal, but I don’t think I’d call it unprofessional. The author simply misunderstood the assignment at a foundational level and is trying to shift the blame for that onto the hiring manager… when that was exactly what they were testing for.
Maybe if the hiring manager didn't want their time wasted they shouldn't be using a stupid take-home prompt? Frankly everything I've seen here indicates that I would never work for Kagi and would actively encourage people to never work there.
A week long take home exam with no discussion after the fact is absolutely unbelievable. It's so disrespectful to the candidates time.
I don't care if the exam wasn't supposed to take a week, or if they get 1 million exams, or if their hiring manager only works 1 hour a day. If that's the case, then they shouldn't be doing this type of test. If you can't handle the heat, get out of the kitchen.
And you are telling me that I should have spent extra time on my code comments?
I have to disagree with your point.
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.
It can be spun with a simple "make live", I mention this in the first line of the README. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
"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)
> "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.
Absolutely spot on, and you ID it later with "Main character syndrome", but it is so very clear from this post's tone & content that OP expected a symmetric outlay of effort & focus from the company's side. They thought they were the main character.
That's a fundamental misunderstanding that seems to have predicated a lot of their ultimate response: they feel as if they were entitled to much more effort from the company than they received. Such is often the case with strong entitlement, it's nearly impossible for the person suffering it to see it.
And you don't? Do you enjoy being walked all over?
“If you're not the hero of your own novel, then what kind of novel is it?”
What you are saying sounds a lot like this:
"it is common for engineers to communicate properly, but people above them prefer to be vague, because plausible deniability is a political advantage to them at the detriment of the engineer"
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.
Sure, for the demo they can choose postmark as a mockup server. But he should keep in mind that postmark is not a hard requirement, eventually they need to switch to something more controllable/cost effective.
Failing to knowledge that is already a considered failure.
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.
This is not that common trait. But if your company has more prototype driven approach with quick “experiment” releases some people are just very bad fit and thats bad for everyone.
There is probably a candidate that thought for 10 minutes - what best can be done in 60min. They probably leveraged some http auth and forms, run that through tiny go backend, sent it with brief email. And they most likely looked a lot better in the process.
Life isn't fair, but apparently we expect more from hiring managers. And since life isn't fair we continue to get disappointed by hiring managers.
Hiring manager:
- Gets paid to perform the interviews
- Spends a 15 minutes answering emails and reviewing the solutions
Candidate(s):
- Does not get paid for their time
- Spends anywhere between 4 to 20 hours (or more) creating the solution
I mean it's right there in the text itself.
This is such a lazy and convenient conclusion for someone that is giving out instructions.
Another valid reason that the students might misunderstand an assignment is because they cannot read minds and the instructions are poorly written.
Good teachers are the ones that make themselves understood by the largest amount of students. Bad teachers are the opposite.
With my best teachers, I never had to question their grading, because it was transparent from the start. So if you are getting a lot of confused students, you might be the common denominator.
Buddhist monks learn by solving riddles and guessing the messages of cryptic messages called Koans. Lets agree that students at a faculty, literally paying for tuition, should not be subject to the same practice.
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.
Yes! That's exactly it.
It is mighty convenient for interviewers to feign ignorance of the power dynamics at play.
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.
Posting a blog article with a link to the code that they felt should have got them the job isn't asking for a code review?
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.
If you post a JS position, you will get 1,000 or more applicants, so it is a huge amount of work behind the scenes to filter this down to try to find the vaguely worthwhile candidates to interview.
If you post, for example, a Clojure position, you will get 10s or maybe even a 100 candidates tops. And they tend to be uniformly more qualified because niche tech tends to self-select folks who want to explore outside the mainstream.
Of course, a lot of businesses want to use mainstream tech because "the hiring pool is much larger", but the flip side is "the hiring process is a lot more work", because of the volume. So, we get a crappy hiring process because they can't scale up a good hiring process :(
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.
This would be acceptable in a world where time is infinite. The reality is that they are going to churn through -who knows- how many candidates, as if it was worthless, as if it was a game.
If they really wanted people to spend little time on the solution, they could include that bit of info in their instructions. Clearly, they omit that bit on purpose. Obviously this is not their first rodeo, they must have done this for a long amount of time now.
Guessing is a skill, and some people are better at it than others. An "educated guess" is based upon knowledge and experience, but little more.
I don't really know that this is what Kagi was looking for though. Perhaps they wanted something more than a guess but less than a full solution. Maybe just enough to gauge the confidence of the candidate.
The "new business" environment often involves a lot of guesswork.
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.
--
Additionally as an experimented Go developer (8 years working with Go as my main language), the code is not great and tbh I would have rejected it if I received this technical test where I work.
In 5 minutes of reading the code:
- lots of commented out test stuff, don't leave that in a take home or I'm gonna assume you'll do the same in your commits
- lots of println but no logging
- relative imports (eg "mymail/app/router"), don't do this
- weird choice of relatively big dependencies (turso? pocketbase? negroni?)
- no architecture or decoupling, everything is in the router
- bad use of the context (getEmails)
- no tests (no need to test everything for a take home but at least some things can be tested)
People say languages are interchangeable and you're never a "xxx" dev, but that's not true. They asked for "Proficiency in Go" and the candidate is not proficient in Go, that would be the number 1 reason for rejection.
Anyway in 2 hours I’m pretty sure I can write some Go code that would get me an offer. This is not about the amount of features, it’s about giving them what they want.
Please do it, get the offer that I didn't, maybe you could even write a blog post about how easy it is and how wrong I am! ;)
The thing is I did a few interviews for Go positions last year and I have a lot of experience with Go so yeah, I’m confident in my skills. I’ve also been on the other side of the process many times and I know exactly what they look for. I’m not saying this test is easy, I’m saying I’m good at it and prepared for these kinds of take homes.
I don’t agree that it’s a bad technical test though, and reading your article I can say your approach was suboptimal. If you keep interviewing for startups you need to put yourself in their shoes.
To quote the test:
> This project tests your ability not only to code, but to deal with ambiguity and open-endedness
The instructions seemed clear. They deliberately set an open ended task, and they want to see how well you independently add valuable features (to a well known format).
I agree that this is an obscene amount of unpaid work but if you're going to do it, you can't ask your hiring contact how to do it. It demonstrates a lack of independence, and that's something they told you they wanted for this role.
I have been at those jobs.
Trust me (or not): even if you are given this kind of freedom at first, it comes back to bite. You want to get the person in charge to agree with your design for any project that takes a week or longer. Otherwise, the moment that your solution does not create the expected happiness in the stakeholders, you are in a position to become the scapegoat.
This sounds cynical at first, but it's just reality. Besides, imagine if you were the boss of someone... It would be of immense value to get a specific plan for a large project before it even begins. There is nothing good about the uncertainty of not having a plan.
Remember this: I did not ask for the plan to be given to me, I created the plan and offered it as a proposal. I am the one doing all of the difficult pieces, and serving it on a golden platter to the person in charge.
A timeboxed test for a small group (say, no more than 10) of final candidates can be an excellent differentiator.
The problem here is Kagi have omitted the timebox, so less confident and/or experienced candidates go to the ends of the earth to deliver something that was never going to meet the mark.
Had Kagi said “spend no more than 4 hours on this” - and arguably reduced some of the requirements accordingly - then your man here wouldn’t have wasted a week (!) of his time and Kagi’s.
It’s a real shame that so much time was wasted by the candidate, but the requirements are very clear that “This project tests your ability … to deal with ambiguity and open-endedness”. He’d already dug a hole for himself before he’d started, unfortunately.
Yes, they should've told you not to bother after you sent that proposal. But they were completely right to ultimately reject you. You're a lot of work.
When I went through the process the company was very small and Vlad personally reviewed applicants, and he used take home projects like this one. It seems like the company has grown larger so now he isn't looking at them himself anymore, but the essence seems the same. If you ever talk to him you'll find that he's basically the Hacker News commenter stereotype and his interview is really a vibe check to see if you seem cool. To him, submitting a long design doc where you go "I am going to use Galactor. I will make sure the project is florp-ready. I will fleem." is the exact opposite of cool. When the assignment says "I want a terminal-inspired email client" the project that passes with flying colors has keyboard shortcuts for everything and comes with a paragraph explaining how it never takes more than 2ms to draw a frame. I suspect the interviewer thinks you are too "enterprise-brained" to work at Kagi.
Now, is this actually a good way to screen people? A bunch of other people here have opinions on it, so I won't rehash it too much. There are obvious problems with it. Vlad basically wants people who think like him. This kind of interview has a lot of problems that have been discussed and studied at length. But if you understand that and are privileged enough to go through that process, the task will actually make sense to you. I think Kagi could do a better job at communicating this. It's unfortunate that you had to waste a bunch of your time to get to this point but I hope you can find something else that matches your working style better.
If you rely on people to work independently, you just can't hire someone who wants feedback everyday to see if they are still on the right track.
You need to have discussions to talk about things like:
* common UX language
* common API expectations
* programming language choice
(because you will not be the only person to work on it)
* in-app / domain language choice
(because your users need to know what a word means.)
* library choice (because you will not be the only person to work on it)
* storage strategy (because there may be legal requirements here)
This isn't exactly the same as if I give people a test on their ability. It's different. In here you pass if you did something that scores well in a metric that you're not told about. It's not very different than if I gave you a take home assignment which is just literally "code something - you have to be good at ambiguity!" Joking, you just have to guess the thing I had in mind. It's very inconsiderate to people, and doesn't tell me anything good about this Vlad person.
> To him, submitting a long design doc where you go "I am going to use Galactor. I will make sure the project is florp-ready. I will fleem." is the exact opposite of cool.
Am I supposed to guess this much?
Do they expect me to creep on their social media to figure this out or something?
Finally, I made it abundantly clear that I am uncool, so giving me the "go ahead", simply to satisfy their curiosity... I hope they are treated the same as they treat other people.
No ill will against you, if anything you are giving me a plausible explanation where I have none. I just wish I had come across a post like mine earlier, and I hope that we, as a collective, start categorizing any job with a "take-home" as a job for the "cool kids". That way, all of us boring and experienced engineers may force companies to adapt if they actually want our labor. And those that do not adapt, we can infer the type of company that "offers" the role.
Quite frankly: yes, I am pretty sure they did. You said you "had heard about Kagi Search as a reputable company" but the point is that they make a specific product for a specific group of people and if you don't "get" that they are not going to hire you. There are a lot of startups like this, mind you, and many of them are weird cults so I understand the hesitation to spend the time learning what everyone's gimmick is. But Kagi is not one of those companies where you get in without knowing what they want. It's not Google where you can get in by knowing some algorithms or your local medical startup that just wants anyone who can write React. Notably I say this without making a value judgement of whether it is "better" or "worse" than those companies. That's just…how it is. Smaller companies, and ones that are more founder driven, tend to have more unusual and specific things they are looking for.
Re: the rest of your post; I think you deserve to be upset that you wasted your time here, and that they didn't communicate clearly with you. That much is pretty obvious. Regardless, I feel like you're still missing something here, and that makes me a little sad. Kagi is definitely not the right place for you, and they should have done better here. You are not "uncool" and take-homes are not for "cool kids". You just have a different working style or stack or whatever than what Kagi was looking for. I am sure your work is fine and that there is someone out there that thinks your project is cool and what Kagi was looking for was boring. Kagi thought my work was interesting but I assure you that a lot of people would find it incredibly tedious and uninteresting.
My goal here was to give you my view of what I think their view was. I'm not really here to condemn or praise it as there are plenty of other people doing that. I just want you to understand it, rather than it leaving you confused and upset.
Seems like he did none of it, and in this company people do not talk and everyone is left guessing what is work consists in, which resonates strangely with the take home assignment directives. What an horrible workplace it would be.
Love the service. Very disappointed in the process. Four days for a take-home with absolutely minimal feedback is really bad. I decided to jump through the hoops because it seemed like a really cool company to work for.
The few that benefit from the abuse also benefit from keeping it hush hush. This is no different from obscuring the pay-bands for employees so that they can get away with underpaying the most vulnerable workers.
I had to submit a short written design proposal and was told to cap it at a few hours and was paid for it. It was accepted and then I spent time implementing a solution. The pay again was capped at a certain amount of hours, but I ended up going past the recommendation because I was actually having fun trying to figure it out.
I submitted the solution and after a while I got a response with basically, "it was a difficult decision, but sorry we're going to pass" and they wouldn't provide additional detail. It's been over 5 years, but I still wonder why they passed.
I can only assume they had a lot of candidates and they may have had other very strong submissions that were better than mine. However, it took a lot out of me emotionally and affected me for quite some time... more than any other interview in my ~20 year career. I feel for the OP.
Make an email client, email view+send, fake backend or real imap, handle plaintext.
At this stage, for a take-home, I'd start working and write down assumptions I made as I went along. I'm probably the opposite of the author, as a take-home (unless it's the last stage or something) is, in my view, a tester to see what a person can do within a few hours of work. I've had several take-home exercises during my time as a software engineer and they varied from "we have provided all details that a stakeholder would provide" to "if you have any further clarifying questions, please get back to us".
The most recent one I took a couple of years ago came with an internal library the company used. They said, "use this library to make a web app that takes advantage of these methods inside of it; create an app that simulates behavios using those methods. Do not spend more than 10 hours on the assignment."
I started coding, I threw something together that worked in about 6-7 hours and I was writing down assumptions as I worked as well as trade-offs from those assumptions. "I assume the user would not be bothered by a failure here, if reliability would be important, what would we want to do in the case of a failure? Retry? Back off retries? etc etc". I then provided the code and provided a list of improvements "Add unit tests to these 3 components, add integration test to ensure this functionality works end-to-end if its essential, improve UI, clean up code base, refactor these services, use a framework/library for the UI instead of hard-coded JS to make these few calls. I wrapped it up because I think I was 70-80% there."
During the next interview with the architect of the company, he said that the solution I provided worked fine, we discussed some things I did and he asked why I did them, but specifically, and this is why I'm commenting here, he mentioned that he appreciated the assumptions document, the future improvements and the "I stopped here because I'd rather get feedback on this and refine, as opposed to keep building something I imagine you want". He said that the ability to work up to a point where you hit the majority of the story and then get feedback on that incomplete project is better than having someone dissapear into a cave for a month to try and come back with the absolute finished product in their oppinion and then having to make changes to get it in line with what was actually wanted.
So I guess, become comfortable with uncertainty. If nothing else, ask only "hey, I assume you want something along these lines that I can bang out in 5-6-10-20-40 hours. If you're not happy with what you get for 5 hours, it might not be a good fit in general or if you think I prioritized the wrong thing in those 5 hours, then we can chat about that too". I am also saying this, because my current role is a lot more in line with what the author is looking for - they spend weeks refining requirements, they write documentation, they create mocks and they have meetings over meetings before I even know what I'm supposed to do and within a day or two they start realizing that what they described is about 10-20% off what they wanted or what is possible and the whole cycle of meetings starts again. Instead, and I've been pushing for this each sprint, I'm asking them to accept a certain level of unknown in a given story, we work on it, we see it behave and get used and refine it based off of that.
The author seems to want waterfall, but agile exists for a reason. Hell, let's not even call it agile or whatever else, in a real situation, you start doing and you learn as you move along. You refine based on feedback, you refine based on new experiences and based on new requirements. You work in the murky areas of someone elses mind. Or not, I don't know, but expecting a series of jira tickets with screenshots and deliverables from a company that just wants to see how you think, how you work with uncertainty and how you deal with unknowns feels... wrong.
Did they, though? From my reading of it, it seems like they wanted a minimal terminal inspired client akin to mutt with a fake backend and plain text.
TUI libraries are more of a PITA than HTML. Also you gotta learn the entire API of a specific TUI library to make it work, this learning will never be useful to you again. With HTML at least you know it is a standard.
And remember, they told me:
> We always have a lot of candidates, some they do the basic, some provide a lot of extra features [...] From hiring point of view, we prefer stronger assessments.
and the instructions mention:
> Do the project in a way that shows off your skills as a developer
The instructions also mention "web app" as a valid solution, literally.
So why should I conclude that making the minimal effort would give me a better chance as an applicant?
There is simply no rhyme or reason to the entire process and communication from the company.
edit: commenters here are also missing the forest for the trees. If the candidate had done X, Y, Z to make a more compelling entry then it would be some other poor guy staring at a two line rejection of tens of hours of work. The process is exploitative.
I've done take-homes before and have been rejected because I followed the prompt to a tee and only did the exact amount of effort they wanted, and was quite literally told that they expected me to do more (outside of the prompt). If you've done enough of this game then everything in the OP will be extremely familiar to you.
The only explanation I can presume is that these people are mistaking TUI for a CLI app, which would be a fatal mistake.
- Proficiency in Go - Strong understanding of scaling and maintaining backend systems - Solid understanding of containerization technologies like Docker
Nailing the take home would require a project that demonstrates all three. Of those I think they maybe do okay on the second one, though offloading to paid services is maybe cheating a little there. I don't think they do well at either of the other two though.
From the detailed spec, one might expect the project to demonstrate those things, but the code as submitted just doesn't.
Never heard back after submitting, spent probably 10 hours on it
In the long run, venting online can be far more damaging than the initial setback - and a huge waste of time!
And, with the market flooded with experienced devs, why should any employer take a chance on a 100% green dev, when they can pick and choose from among 5+ YoE SWEs, who are desperate for jobs? As Shawn's post from yesterday showed, many of us are willing to work at much lower salaries, so even financially, it does not make sense to hire a fresher.
Anyone care to engage with this topic?
Just two things:
- If the candidate already has a portfolio, whether personal projects on GitHub, open source contributions, or projects they're willing to share directly, why do you need to make them implement some specific project? The whole point of a take-home assignment is the discussion that follows it where you talk about the code, which trade-offs they made and why, and you try to get a general feel for their understanding and enthusiasm for the domain. Whether they implemented something specific is irrelevant.
I get that this is often done to make lives easier for the interviewer, and to be able to relatively compare implementations between candidates, but every candidate is different, and since you want to judge their thinking the project should be relatively open-ended as well. So just spend some time to review their portfolio instead of asking them to implement the same cookie-cutter project.
- All take-home assignments should be paid. Period. Don't ask candidates to work for free. Agree on a time estimate, and pay them a fair hourly rate. The initial offer can be some average rate for the specific role, but if the candidate has a higher rate, then negotiate based on that. It's disrespectful to expect them to work for free, only to reject them afterwards. This way at least it wouldn't be a complete waste of their time.
I'm disappointed that Kagi's process doesn't take these two points into consideration.
That said, my favorite interview style for programmers is the code review. Show them a piece of intentionally buggy and incomplete code, ask them to mention any issues they find, and to fix them. This could be open ended and include performance issues, testing, etc. Then you work on it together, the interviewer almost taking a co-driver seat in a pair programming session, and the discussion is almost always relaxed and informative. I've been on both sides of this type of interview and it's always been a positive experience, and most candidates enjoy it as well. It's much better than a stressful "here's a blank whiteboard, implement this from scratch", a leet-code style puzzle, and much less of a time-investment than a take-home assignment.
I often see people applying make this same mistake with their CV. They'll have a 5 page long incredibly overfilled CV with whatever they ever worked on. Instead, just make it one single clear and concise page so that the recruiter can quickly assess your selling point relevant to the position. They don't have time for all this so why would you?
You should know your worth as an employee. If a company asks for too much you must have the ability to stop yourself from working for an entire week with no compensation.
And tbh the result is just a solution (ignoring all the issues of is this terminal inspired and is email backend as a service acceptable choice) - looks generic, nothing interesting besides a super long proposal and super long readme to achieve nothing special honestly. Just a solution checking the boxes. Probably one of many. That’s why probably wasn’t selected.
TL;DR
1. Be more concise in messaging and documentation 2. Do something more than just the working solution esp if they mention brownie points for cool stuff in the task description
They literally said they want a simple TUI email app
> If he wanted a simpler solution, he could have told me on March 18, when I submit my proposal.
When he said your emails could be stored in a fake database or loaded in memory it was obvious they didn’t want something over complicated.
No one likes over engineering, it can come off as egotistical, indulgent and more importantly a sign of technical debt lurking ahead.
Your proposal is long winded, you’re not the only applicant these people are looking at my guy.
I’m not sure what Fargate is (nor care) or even why you suggested AWS and all that other jazz but you clearly went overboard. No one wants a developer where you ask them for A and they return A B and a half finished C.
Yes, you’re allowed to ask questions but the ones you asked showed signs of overthinking and lack of initiative.
if you can't provide that then i think you haven't created one, and if you haven't created one i'm guaranteed to be wasting my time because you're just doing vibe interviewing.
This kind of "do something for X but we won't tell you how!" looks a whole lot like market research disguised as an interview, that way they can do the research for free.
1) An open-ended take-home assignment with no expected time limit and extremely little guidance is a very poor choice for an initial assessment of a candidate
2) A week of work is way too long to spend on such an assignment unless it explicitly says it expects that much time (and even then, I'd decline)
3) It doesn't seem like what OP produced in that week was terribly strong; it seems heavy on documentation and low on usable code. I see why he was passed.
4) Kagi as a company has always seemed to have an extremely fire-from-the-hip, whatever-Vlad-thinks-is-cool mentality, and I don't honestly trust it much as a result; it also seems like it therefore would not hire someone who works the way OP does.
5) Companies implicitly hire people who are similar to the ones they currently have unless they work strenuously to avoid doing so (in a personality and technical knowledge sense; this is not a comment about "DEI" or something)
6) Asking someone to put in a lot of time and effort and then providing essentially no feedback is an extremely common dick move
7) Take-home assignments should be compensated, if only some token amount, to express gratitude to the candidate for their effort. The better long-form take-home assignments do this already (Automattic is one example of a company that does this, and their other behavior aside, I think it's a good move)
All in all, nobody in this article comes off particularly well. I think OP managed to demonstrate why Kagi has this assessment while also producing an effective indictment of the assessment as a poor choice of hiring tool. Even so, I'm glad OP posted this, credit to him for showing what the hiring world is like right now. It's rough out there.
The actual software engineering and coding is now a lot less valuable as compared to building something useful within constraints. Anyways, here are my thoughts
1. The interviewee failed to truly appreciate the need for ambiguity. Some people felt the interview was over after the submission of the proposal and I agree with them. Coming up with your own requirements was necessary. And this requires your judgement in determining what was essential or not. This skill is surprisingly rare.
2. Good taste is also now more important than ever. It is also hard to test but the interview questions were really good in that regard. They gave you nudges towards the ideal state and left the door open for you to determine the best "path" towards that goal. This tends to reveal a lot about a developer that they might not even be aware of - like over engineering. For a take home like this, I felt the proposal and the half a dozen AWS services was not in good taste. It was probably more complicated than it needed to be.
3. Deadline and deliverables. Exceeding the deadline is a negative. The final solution is not terminal inspired and those alone may qualify as basis of rejection.
4. Of course the hiring manager should probably have rejected the proposal but will that be fair on other candidates? I also feel giving you access to a hiring manager is a stroke of genius. They can assess you via the kind of questions you asked. And I doubt this candidate asked the "right questions". Right here means that they understood the point of the take-home and also what needed to be built. I didn't get that impression from the candidate.
5. I truly believe take-homes like this should be paid. I just don't know how it might work in the real world or whether they are sustainable. The payment here is just a consolation for those that never make it so that their valuable time will be respected. Even more so because I feel a lot of people will probably diverge from the spirit of the exercise.
Do I get some bonus points for being born in the same country as the founder?
austin-cheney•1mo ago