Dear Mr. Architect!
Please design and build me a house. I am not quite sure of what I need, so you should use your discretion. My house should have between two and forty-five bedrooms. Just make sure the plans are such that the bedrooms can be easily added or deleted. When you bring the blueprints to me, I will make the final decision of what I want. Also, bring me the cost breakdown for each configuration so that I can arbitrarily pick one.
Keep in mind that the house I ultimately choose must cost less than the one I am currently living in. Make sure, however, that you correct all the deficiencies that exist in my current house (the floor of my kitchen vibrates when I walk across it, and the walls don’t have nearly enough insulation in them).
As you design, also keep in mind that I want to keep yearly maintenance costs as low as possible. This should mean the incorporation of extra-cost features like aluminium, vinyl, or composite siding. (If you choose not to specify aluminium, be prepared to explain your decision in detail.)
Please take care that modern design practices and the latest materials are used in construction of the house, as I want it to be a showplace for the most up-to-date ideas and methods. Be alerted, however, that kitchen should be designed to accommodate, among other things, my 1952 Gibson refrigerator.
To insure that you are building the correct house for our entire family, make certain that you contact each of our children, and also our in-laws. My mother-in-law will have very strong feelings about how the house should be designed, since she visits us at least once a year. Make sure that you weigh all of these options carefully and come to the right decision. I, however, retain the right to overrule any choices that you make.
Please don’t bother me with small details right now. Your job is to develop the overall plans for the house: get the big picture. At this time, for example, it is not appropriate to be choosing the color of the carpet. However, keep in mind that my wife likes blue.
Also, do not worry at this time about acquiring the resources to build the house itself. Your first priority is to develop detailed plans and specifications. Once I approve these plans, however, I would expect the house to be under roof within 48 hours.
While you are designing this house specifically for me, keep in mind that sooner or later I will have to sell it to someone else. It therefore should have appeal to a wide variety of potential buyers. Please make sure before you finalize the plans that there is a consensus of the population in my area that they like the features this house has.
Please prepare a complete set of blueprints. It is not necessary at this time to do the real design, since they will be used only for construction bids. Be advised, however, that you will be held accountable for any increase of construction costs as a result of later design changes.
You must be thrilled to be working on an interesting project as this! To be able to use the latest techniques and materials and to be given such freedom in your designs is something that can’t happen very often. Contact me as soon as possible with your complete ideas and plans.
P.S.: My wife has just told me that she disagrees with many of the instructions I’ve given you in this letter. As architect, it is your responsibility to resolve these differences. I have tried in the past and have been unable to accomplish this. If you can’t handle this responsibility, I will have to find another architect.
P.P.S.: Perhaps what I need is not a house at all, but a travel trailer. Please advise me as soon as possible if this is the case.
But before I hire you, can you please build a small house or a shed or a trampoline to show me that you have the skills of an architect. The exact details of what to build will be given to you when the test assignment starts.
This is for free of course.
Given the number of people in our last round of hiring who completely failed at producing said shed this step was 100% necessary.
That smells of managerial incompetence, or an architect not doing his job.
Or the technical challenge being ridiculous like a lot of them are. If you have that many people failing it, that tells me some or all of these things are true:
Seriously, some tech companies think they shit gold and give ridiculous challenges that reflect that delusion.
Source: been in tech since 2005 and in a terminal since I was 12.
That’s a long time to wait at an airport terminal! Is that Tom Hanks movie based off your life?
Lmao, great film. Pictured myself hacking away on some shitty laptop, while bathing with paper towels in an airport bathroom.
My own take as someone internal to that process is that it was a combination of 1 and 5.
I have no idea how candidates were screened. I do know that even before the “technical challenge” we had a large number of candidates completely faceplant on lowball questions asking what single line snippets of code did.
I can also say that I absolutely did not expect prod-ready results from the challenge. But I did expect things like not vomiting raw uuids on the screen instead of user readable values when displaying results. Or not having commits from overseas dev contractors which did all the actual work in your git log.
Oof those are some stinkers. I’ve seen bad but never anything like hiring a contractor to do your code challenge work for you.