7y
This is Cliff, VP of Engineering at Evergage.
We are always grateful for critical and honest feedback, whether from employees or prospective candidates. We take hiring very seriously. So I would like to thank the candidate who provided this review. That said, I would like to correct a few inaccuracies.
We do not use candidates’ take-home submissions as “free work.” We use them for technical evaluation. We ask that it be kept confidential for the obvious reason that we wish to reuse the exercise. Since this was a front-end role, we asked for the submission to be styled, because we want a sense of the candidate’s facility with styling, and how they handle the separation of content and presentation.
The take-home test can take a day to complete. Some spend less time. It has been done successfully and done well by many developers who work here today. However, we have received feedback in the past that the test is too time-consuming, so we have written a new, more succinct one which we will be giving going forward.
Regarding our in-person interview, the single question this candidate was asked is not in the LeetCode style. It was a question about a UI component one of our front-end engineers designed, truly relevant to the job of front-end engineer at Evergage. The candidate was not asked to write actual code, but rather to work through how they would approach implementing the component at a high level.
We ask a mix of technical and non-technical questions and spend time reviewing the submitted code to understand why an applicant made the choices they did. To our surprise, this candidate walked out of the first interview after about 10 minutes, so they would not know that.
Regarding the whiteboard question, it saddens me that a developer would be insulted by the suggestion of talking through a problem with another developer - this is something we do all day long here at Evergage.
Thank you for reading this response to the candidate’s feedback. And if you’re a developer and write great code, and are happy to talk through tough technical problems with your colleagues, I hope you’ll have a look at our open opportunities at our careers page.