Engineering video
1:19 · 10 August 2025
Candidates usually receive no feedback or generic, non-actionable responses like claims of overengineering, which makes it easy for evaluators to reject people without true context.
Hear it at 0:03 →Take-home challenges swallow time and energy, preventing engineers from iterating on their resumes or applying elsewhere, which frequently leads to burnout.
Hear it at 0:56 →and then so what's the problem with take home challenges? You know, why are they the worst kind of interview you can invest your time in as a software engineer? Well, the number one reason is that in most cases, you literally get no feedback. You'll get a generic email, maybe they tell you something like, oh, we would like you if you would use more design patterns or use this or that, or maybe you overengineered, but literally that's not actionable feedback that you can use to get better.
The second thing is you might get rejected over some random or very vague reason. So they'll be like, oh, we believe in this file you overengineered. It's so easy to pick something up and reject someone. A lot of people think code is very objective in the sense of you can evaluate good code or bad code. But the reality is that without the context, you don't really know. And so people will go in, assume whatever and then reject you over the fact that you overengineered or whatever reason, you didn't use you know design patterns, and they swallow too much of your time and energy.
So you're not getting much feedback, but at the same time, you don't have a lot of time to keep up with your interviewing process. You don't have time to iterate on your resume, to apply to more companies, to have more interviews, because they really swallow your time. And a lot of people do those and they just burn themselves out, and then they go to interviews and get rejected because guess what, they look burnt out and they're quite negative.
