not sure what your question is really trying to get at, but i think i tried it a couple times just for practice/learning and it might have been ok.

but i was recently going thru an interview process and they sprung a shitrank on me, and i thought seriously about doing it, but not before pushing back. i ended up talking to the hiring manager first, who then still insisted i go thru w/ the shitrank test. i thought i had escaped it.

i thought, bro, i literally was on the phone with you for 30 minutes. you could have asked me _anything_. but i guess they just wanted the shitrank.

so i started to take it. read thru the first question and was like, 'whut?'

it wasn't that is was shockingly easy or difficult - it was that i literally couldn't understand what it was saying. the rage just came over me as i was reading something like, "Johnny had an apple but wanted a pear.." -- some weird shit.

i think it was scheduled to be a 30-min quiz thing, and it was just pick whatever language you want and shuffle some words and println() or something. i think all of the things that make people pissed off about having to take shitranks just hit me at once and i was like FUCK these people.

so i told them, actually-politely i think, that i'd changed my mind and was withdrawing my candidacy and good luck, etc. i tried not to be passive-aggressive - not just because i don't know what that phrase means, but also because i just didn't want to be that way - it sounds bad.

HR pinged me back to ask for details but i ghosted. don't play stupid, people.

i do think it's a good weed-out test for companies. and if they lose a good candidate? there will be another tomorrow. or ten more already in the pipeline. i feel like i've learned at least that much over the years -- we're all expendable -- much moreso than most of us would like to believe.

skipping shitranks, and thus jobs, is prob much worse for candidates on the whole. if you got a piece of paper from stanford or mit, you can walk away from anything without feeling the effects, but normal people like me will pay -- we'll feel it -- employers are not beating down my door.

i've been thinking about shitrank and homework and things a bit - mainly b/c i'm interviewing right now - i'm straight _in_ the shit - but i kind of think of jobs, not work, as being anti-human anyways, so what if i _do_ perform this little humiliating dance just to get hired?

is it going to be worse than the 40 hours a week of humiliation i'm going to go thru for the next however many months or years? granted, most of that is not _that_ humiliating, especially if i'm mostly the one subjecting others to the humiliation -- during my stand-ups -- but it's still a job, still renting yourself, etc.

so, then why not just do the test/homework? in my case, it was 30 minutes. that's not bad.

a previous interviewer was asking me to take 10 or so hours, i think, to do homework.

a different company, mlops, was asking me to spend the turkey day weekend ("not the _whole_ weekend, hahahaha") doing homework.

these are not even for real tech positions -- they're like tech support-related.

but back to my 30 minutes - i thought, if i do this, if i can just grin and bear this 30 minutes of stupidity, i can prob actually get this job, stop interviewing, stop dancing multiple times a day, just get this job and go back to life trying to make one of my side projects successful.

nope - couldn't do it.

tried, tho! :)