alt Hacker News100%. I just went through an interview process where I absolutely killed the assignment (had the best one they'd seen), had positive signal/feedback from multiple engineers, CEO liked me a lot etc, only to get sunk by a CTO who thought it would be cool to give me a surprise live test because of "vibe coding paranoia". 11 weeks in the process, didn't get the role. Beyond fucking stupid.
This was the demo/take-home (for https://monumental.co): https://github.com/rublev/monumental
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Hah I feel you there. Around 2 years ago I did a take home assignment for a hiring manager (scientist) for Merck. The part B of the assignment was to decode binary data and there were 3 challenges: easy, medium and hard.
I spent around 40 hours of time and during my second interview, the manager didn't like my answer about how I would design the UI so he quickly wished me luck and ended the call. The first interview went really well.
For a couple of months, I kept asking the recruiter if anyone successfully solved the coding challenge and he said nobody did except me.
Out of respect, I posted the challenge and the solution on my github after waiting one year.
Part 2 is the challenging part; it's mostly a problem solving thing and less of a coding problem: https://github.com/jonnycoder1/merck_coding_challenge
A surprise live test is absolutely the wrong approach for validating whether someone's done the work. IMO the correct approach is to go through the existing code with the applicant and have them explain how it works. Someone who used AI to build it (or in the past had someone else build it for them) wouldn't be able to do a deep dive into the code.
That is an insane amount of work for a job application. Were you compensated for it at all?
Damn... that's WAY more than I'll do for an interview process assignment... I usually time box myself to an hour or two max. I think the most I did was a tic-tac-toe engine but ran out of time before I could make a UI over it.
This repo has enough red flags to warrant some suspicion.
You have also not attempted to hide that, which is interesting.
Wait, what.. you did this as a take home for a position? Damn that looks excessive.
It's funny because this repo really does seem vibe-coded. Obviously I have no reason not to believe you, but man! All those emojis in the install shell script - I've never seen anyone other than an AI do that :) Maybe you're the coder that the AI companies trained their AI on.
Sorry about the job interview. That sucks.