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Comment by jboy55 | Hacker News Reader

Its interesting how many of these companies have 'take home' challenges or projects. Even though the companies may say, "This should only take an hour", 99% of the time, it occupies my entire night/weekend, if not in coding but in thought. There's always something more you could do. Its presented as an objective test, but its very subjective, just as much as the whiteboard test.

With the whiteboard test, as a candidate, I know that when my hour is over, its done. Plus, I can get feedback during my whiteboard session to know if I'm on the right track, I can ask questions and get guidance on where to concentrate my efforts. With take home projects, I've woken up in the middle of the night and thought, "Wait, I know this is a full stack position, and they said that the UX just needs to be functional, but maybe my CSS knowledge is too old, and there's a better/newer way of doing the styles. I should really spend all night researching this, wait, BOM?! I should convert over to that, I don't want the front eng engineer reviewing this code and saying, OMG, this is so old, NOHIRE!"

EDIT:

Also, take home challenges are probably very discriminatory towards older candidates with families. So maybe just as subtle way of age discrimination?

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> Also, take home challenges are probably very discriminatory towards older candidates with families. So maybe just as subtle way of age discrimination?

I see this sentiment fairly frequently, and TBH, it completely baffles me. I am in my mid 40s. Yes, I don't have nearly as much energy nor desire to spend all weekend doing take-home programming assignments as I did 20 years ago. But if one candidate is willing to do more work and preparation for an interview, that's not 'discrimination' - that's one person showing they are willing to put more effort into a job than another.

True, your family obligations may mean you don't have as much time to spend on that preparation. If that's the case, that's a fine, very reasonable trade-off you've made to prioritize your family over your work. But then it strikes me as entirely UNreasonable to accuse businesses of discrimination because they choose employees who have decided not to make that same trade-off.

The whole bent against white board questions is that they are unrealistic as to actual working conditions and thus are artificial. So if you are a successful engineer, using your work time efficiently, and yet, you have family obligations that prevent you from spending enough time as someone else on a take home challenge, is the take home challenge showing realistic 'working conditions'? Or is it a measure of freetime?

>If that's the case, that's a fine, very reasonable trade-off you've made to prioritize your family over your work.

I'd advise that if you are ever involved in a hiring situation you never write that down. "I'm sorry my project wasn't done so well, [my baby, pregnancy, illness, religious service] took most of my weekend".

That is a prime example of age/gender/disability discrimination. You should never assume someone's out side of work life presumes an inability to do the job during work hours.

The vast majority of jobs I've worked at have required some flexibility in working off hours. Whether it was something that went down at off hours that needed to be addressed, or an unforeseen (and unforseeable) change in a business that required a last minute scramble, these things happen.

True, there may be some jobs that are truly 9-5, and if that's the case, so be it. But frankly, as someone who is willing to put more dedication into my work, it feels like complete discrimination against me if someone willing to do less work then demands the same level of compensation and advancement opportunities.

If 'Work Hours' require someone to be oncall 24/7, you can ask that as part of your interview, but you can't infer that from other factors.

Yes: "Our job requires you to be on-call 24/7, one week a month, can you commit to that?".

No: "You said you didn't have time for the take home test because you have a family. The family will get in the way of 24/7 support"

Also yes: "you will be traveling 5 days a week for your sales job, can you do this?" No. "We don't hire people with families for this job."

And, there's no discrimination towards you putting more time into your work. That's quite a stretch, if all you have going for you is your ability to put in more that 60 hours a week, that's not saying much.

As someone who has been in this industry for a long time and seen a lot, this still baffles me.

Who agrees to being on call 24/7 for a week? Especially when you are getting paid a typical professional salary? It seems absurd. I've always been active after hours and willing to jump in when things happen.

But this idea that you are essentially working (since you need to always be somewhere you can start working within minutes) for a week out of a month every month of your life for a salary job with no equity or long term payoff on the other end, has to be the most bizarre choice a person could make.

Maybe there is something to that I don't understand? I guess if you don't have any other interests or people in your life. But that just seems really sad.

Possibly someone who does this could help me to understand this a little better?

I've been on call most of my working life. When I worked at reddit, I was on call 24/7/365. The only time I wasn't on call was for the weekend of my wedding.

When I got to Netflix, only being on call one week a month was a drastic improvement. It meant that I could plan my vacations and important family events around not being on call. On the flip side, my family understood if I suddenly got up from dinner to take a call or get out my laptop. My on call schedule was shared with the family so we could all plan accordingly. Sometimes when it was my week and I had something really important, I would ask a coworker to cover that night for me, and then do the same for them in the future.

The salary for the position accounted for this inconvenience, and it wasn't a surprise. Since everyone who does SRE has this same responsibility, it's built into the compensation. Some companies actually give you extra money when you are on call (I hear Google is one of them).

Yeah, it kinda sucks from a family perspective, but it is what it is. As long as you set expectations with everyone around you, it's not that big a deal.

As it turned out at Netflix, since I was the lead, it meant that I was the secondary or tertiary on call at all times, but again, the family knew this, and also, my coworkers knew that if I didn't answer it was because I really really couldn't take the call at that time, and everyone was fine with that. It just rolled up to next person. Only the first on call was expected to answer, all the rest of us were on a "it would be great if you could" basis.

I do call one week in 10. I typically have between one and three out-of-hours pages during this time. A typical page takes 20 minutes to deal with, although sometimes they do take longer.

30-minute response time means I can still do things like skiing or hiking during on-call weekends, if I'm a bit creative.

As a result of doing call, my team's product runs reliably and meets its SLA requirements, allowing my company to sell the product to other serious companies and therefore for my job to exist.

I get paid around $4k for each week of this (on top of my normal salary). It is worth it for me.

I have "other interests and people in my life", including a girlfriend, friends, outdoor adventuring. One week in ten hardly affects anything, and I can usually trade with a teammate if I want to go away a particular week. Most of my friends have their own careers which make far more onerous demands on their lives for less compensation (doctors, lawyers, nurses, restaurateurs).

Our company introduced this last year. The reactions ranged from "the fuck you think I'm going to do this" to "you bunch of whiners, when I did Ops I was on call 25/8/370 for $0". The way teams implemented it ranged from "you have that week to work on whatever you want/not show up" to "well we don't expect any out of hours calls so we won't implement anything except a roster". It's been fascinating.

Going on 25 years now of being oncall. It's very, very good incentive to make sure the systems are optimized and working nicely.

I get a page about once a month, maybe. Because I do my job.

This.

Automate well enough and you almost never get called.

> Who agrees to being on call 24/7 for a week? Especially when you are getting paid a typical professional salary? It seems absurd. I've always been active after hours and willing to jump in when things happen.

That's called being on-call 24/7 for the entire span of your job.

I agree with all of your examples - it is discrimination if an employer says "your family will get in the way of you working off hours."

What I find obnoxious, though, is when an employer has standard rules for everyone (e.g. "all prospective applicants must produce a 3 hour at home project as part of the interview process") and then balk at "discrimination" because you'd rather spend your time at your kid's soccer game.

This also strikes me as the height of white-collar privilege, because there are tons of other jobs (e.g. military jobs, oil rig workers, construction jobs, etc.) that require a hell of a lot more family sacrifice, but it's mainly highly paid software developers that protest so much at a couple hour non-9-5 project.

The challenge with substantial take home tests is that they have the potential skew your applicant pool in a number of ways that are not ideal for your business.

Firstly, as a general rule of thumb, the very best developers who are in the highest demand are unlikely to jump through the hoops, so immediately you're filtering out the very best applicants. As a business owner, that's not something I want to do.

Secondly, and equally importantly, you are likely to get more, young financially stable people with less outside of work commitments (including families which naturally correlate with age which in turn correlates with experience).

If you want to over-index on people with less experience and at the same time reduce the number of applications from people for whom the time commitment is problematic (including but not limited to females who statistically take on a disproportionate percentage of child care responsibilities and some members of traditionally under represented minorities) all you do is reduce the likely diversity of talent you might otherwise get to pick from for your dev team.

>...the very best developers who are in the highest demand are unlikely to jump through the hoops...

I think that this applies for the best anything but, conversely, companies still want them to jump through the hoops. You need to convince the company you're a worthwhile hire and the company, in all of it's arrogance and self-righteous glory, spends little to no effort convincing you its a worthwhile place to work[0].

You see this in questions like, "So, why do you want to work here?" If we're pointedly blunt, we could just say, "You're hiring for 'x', I can do 'x'; also, I like having money versus not having it," but that would be taken as arrogant and/or "not be a team player" or "not very interested in the company or the role".

Let's face it: The world is filling itself with the "drink the kool-aid" types and, so, companies use that as a gatekeeper, so to speak. "A good company fit." "We just want to see if you're a fit for the company."

An experienced <x> is probably far less concerned with the pointless fact 'y' of your company versus, say, the company's culture or if you have matching contributions. If they've put in the time to make themselves an industry expert in something, then - of course - they're going to be a good company fit, at the end of the day. You're just looking for people who will be acquiescent and/or will jump through the hoops. ...but why...? For an entry-level position, I can understand it. For someone who's dev'ed for the last 10 years at 'zed' company, what function does that hurdle hope to accomplish, if not the aforementioned?

[0]-Not really true for Europe, though, so thank feck for that, but have seen it in the states.

> You see this in questions like, "So, why do you want to work here?" If we're pointedly blunt, we could just say, "You're hiring for 'x', I can do 'x'; also, I like having money versus not having it," but that would be taken as arrogant and/or "not be a team player" or "not very interested in the company or the role".

I've never failed in taking the latter approach in any interview I've ever faced. (I've been rejected; that's different).

I tend to think this is more about whether you're... 'politically risk-averse', for lack of better terminology.

Almost all of the companies that have found a "real" response to that sort of question bad (e.g. given me the gasp or whatever) have been drone-shops. To some extent it was a sort of 'soft-reject' on my side. A minority in any case.

Maybe one day it'll hurt me. I'm not sure. I think it's a pretty good filter against working with dickheads.

I am in Europe, mind. For a month or so at least. ;)

I work 10 hours a day, my wife does as well, and we start at substantially different times. We have a child who can stay up until 11.

If I'm doing multiple interviews (which everyone should be doing) and each requires 3 hours of my time (generous underestimate) then what am I going to do? Hire a sitter for a potential job for each of these companies?

Give me whiteboarding interviews -- at least the studying is cross applicable.

Last time I went interviewing, that’s exactly what I did for the take home projects: hire a sitter.

When you're looking at $60 an interview and looking at probably 10+ interviews to find a good fit then why am I going to spend $600 when I can brush up on information that I already know from school and work at a fraction of the cost?

It’s a place you want to work? I’ve never done more than 3 interviews in a go, but I also only apply to jobs I really want.

> then what am I going to do? Hire a sitter for a potential job for each of these companies?

Yes, why not? For many people taking time off their existing job during the work day to interview is difficult, but they find a way to do it.

My whole point in this thread is not that interviewing isn't onerous, or that some companies may require more of a time investment than some people are willing to make (and, if that's the case, it's fine to say that job/company isn't for you). What I find obnoxious is when people turn their unwillingness to spend time on the interview or homework as "you are discriminating against me because I am older or because children."

Because that's absurd when I can just apply to companies that have reasonable hiring practices that aren't effectively lock in.

How does someone know that their coworker with family isn't just a better negotiator than them or that they didn't come at an opportune time when their employer was more desperate for the coworker's skillset?

There's a reason there's so much room for plausible deniability in these matters.

Traditionally, having a family is viewed as a positive because you are more likely to get a more stable, longer term worker.

"some" being the keyword. It's understandable if there's a scramble if the codebase you're directly responsible for goes down.

I think it depends on how much sysops/devops is involved in your job or if that's a separate team. And how robust your codebase is etc.

Couldn't you use the time that you would have been doing the whiteboard interview to do the take home work? If you have time to go to an interview in the middle of the day, you should have time in the middle of the day to do a take home project.

A take home test rarely means there is no in person interview. You will still get 'soft' questions from managers, product managers etc for half a day.

whiteboard = artificial. I don't agree. When I interview I don't expect working code on WB, I expect discussion about what is written there. Also I expect when interviewed that there will be discussion about approach I took.

WB usage is also testing presentation skills. It is used in companies when you want to present your ideas to others, etc.

I agree with what you say as-is, but the other side of it is that the company might not be making optimal hiring decisions by doing this discrimination. A 22 year-old can choose to spend a full weekend on an interview task and do a great job, but once hired that doesn't mean they will actually work more hours (though they might). If we assume that once hired both the 20yo and the 40yo will work 40 hour weeks (i'm in europe), then it wouldn't be optimal to compare their take-homes evenly if the 20yo had spent way more time on it.

Anyway its complicated. Seems like on-site open-book 90 minute real-world problems would be a nice solution.

> Seems like on-site open-book 90 minute real-world problems would be a nice solution.

It is. And it's superior to a take-home test because you know the candidate wrote the code, you know how long it took them, and you can turn it into a pair-programming exercise.

People whose kids are older may have forgotten how hard it is to get even five minutes to one's self at home, when there are infants or toddlers in the house, let alone an hour or two. Without an adequate support network in place, a parent might have to pay a babysitter to get the time to do the take-home. So yes, take-homes which are expected to be done in one's "free time" are discriminatory against those with families.

Who says that they are expected to be done in one’s “free time”? What responsibility or business is it of an employer to know how candidates are making time for the job interview process?

If any non-zero time required to obtain a particular job is descriminatory then every existent hiring process is discriminatory. What do you suggest, drawing lots?

> I am in my mid 40s. Yes, I don't have nearly as much energy...

Do people in their mid 40's have less energy for some reason? Do you exercise regularly? Do you get enough sleep? Do you eat healthily? You don't mention anything about a family obligation taking up your time. I am 41 and I don't have any lack of energy issues. I don't think it's a 40's thing, more of decades of bad lifestyle decisions catching up. Which I don't think should be out of bounds for a company to consider when hiring as long as it isn't due to health issues beyond the candidate's control. I guess this distinction can get fuzzy, but I stress that there shouldn't be any reason why in your 40s you should have dramatically lower levels of energy than in your 20s.

Honestly depicting people in their 40s as having less energy does more harm than good. It's just feeding into the perception of older people as less capable when it's not true across the board. It's not OK. I don't have less energy, I have tons of energy and I'm sure many people older than me do as well.

It's more that family demands tend to be less friendly to time shifting. You can't just put off feeding your kids, grounding them for getting into trouble, or changing their wet sheets at 2 a.m.

Single people (and empty nesters to be fair) can more often skip some happy hours or some intramural games.

And to be even more fair, once employed, it seems parental excuses (my kids blah blah) get more understanding than single excuses (I need to actually date, my boyfriend blah blah). But I'll wager the interview process is more complicated for people with families.

Family obligations taking up time I can understand, but the person I am replying to just seemed to equate 40s as being in a state of having less energy without mentioning family obligations. I am taking issue with 40's being a state where you have less energy. I don't believe it is true, unless there's an underlying health condition that has little to do with age.

> if one candidate is willing to do more work ... that's one person showing they are willing to put more effort into a job than another

I'm not happy with this logic. It's harmful. If you extend it further, it motivates everybody to work more hours too.

"If a person is willing to put more effort into a job than another let him do that! Oh and by the way, let's fire those who are not and hire those who are".

And we're back to 12+ hour work day and a lot of great specialists are out of their jobs or forced to sacrifice their time with families, friends, hobbies, physical activities, etc.

There are ways to conduct interviews without whiteboarding AND without take home assignments.

It's not a trade-off! We as a species absolutely require people to have kids. Discriminating against those who do is the most fundamantally wrong thing I can think of.

It is what we are here for, if nothing else.

It is interesting that you use, “... willing to put more effort...”. It isn’t about will, it’s about time. But hey, if we’re going to generalize, I bet a dev with a family is more “willing” to do hard work for a company than some single dev.

> Also, take home challenges are probably very discriminatory towards older candidates with families. So maybe just as subtle way of age discrimination?

And whiteboard interviews are discriminatory towards people with anxiety who have trouble thinking clearly when they are in the spotlight with all eyes on them, no? Where does the microaggressions game start and end?

My current company does,

-Offer choice between live coding and take home assignment. Regardless of picking the assignment, we do have multiple questions like "given this piece of code find the bug", but they won't require writing actual code.

-Home assignment for remote candidates. With a second round where we discuss and provide feedback (or the candidate explains their thought process) if needed. The candidate is also judged how feedback is received and argued about. If adequate documentation has been supplied we skip the second round too, or just do it in email back n forth.

-And if you have an impressive active blog and an active github profile you probably evade both live coding and assignment (but still get asked the usual questions about architecture, algorithm use, whether you 'll be a good personality/culture-fit etc).

Despite being "nice" our rejection ratio is quite high (at least in my team), and people who picked the assignment themselves/no-pressure applied then bitched about it on glassdoor. Even though they had the option to not have to do it at all. I don't get it.

>And whiteboard interviews are discriminatory towards people with anxiety who have trouble thinking clearly when they are in the spotlight with all eyes on them, no? Where does the microaggressions game start and end?

So Gender/Age/Disabilty discrimination are now microagrssions? It seems from your description of your hiring practice, someone has thought of the implications of take home questions given the choice between live and take home.

My point is, replacing white board questions with entirely take home questions is probably discriminatory.

Not to parse words too cutely, but, to hire someone requires discriminating amongst all of the applicants to choose the best fits. This is different from discrimination (which is “unjust”). There are certain protected classes that you are ethically not allowed to discriminate against. It is supposed to be merit based, but there is no perfect system. You would have to double blind reviewers, etc. so bias will always happen. As long as you arent doing it on purpose based on a protected class, I think whiteboard / take home are pretty tame and acceptable. Take home assignments work fine IMO. We have them and our company skews much older than SV. We have approx half or more of the company with kids and families and they have all gone through the same hiring process.

> So Gender/Age/Disabilty discrimination are now microagrssions?

Do you have any cases to cite for the proposition that take home interview assignments to be per se “Gender/Age/Disability” discrimination? From any court anywhere?

I have taken multiple of these take home assignments. One from Microsoft as well. What was a 2 day affair turned out to be a week long affair. I was asked to implement one of the iOS outlook features which involved multiple nesting of scrollviews in gridviews and what not. Took me 4 days and when I submitted the repo, the response I got was 'sorry this doesn't cut it and we can't proceed'. I mean, can't the reviewers at least provide some comment in the repo ?

OTOH, I took a Facebook remote test that was timed (I think 30 mins) and the reviewer exactly told me why I didn't clear the test within 24 hours of submission. I don't necessarily agree with everything Facebook does but I really appreciate this level of response.

So, I'll happily do a whiteboard test no matter how unrealistic it is.

This is the fundamental problem with take home tests. The amount of time the candidate spends is way too high compared to the amount of feedback they get.

We do the take home tests because it allows the candidate to work in a more natural way, without the pressure of completing in an hour, under scrutiny and in such a highly consequential circumstance. Also, we allow as much time as they need to take to get it done. Some come back in a couple of days, some in a week.

Then we have them present their code in a code review in front of the team. This gives a good indication of their ability to explain their thinking and approach clearly and is a good read on their communication skills.

So far, no complaints, though it is true that many of them get a bit wrapped up in the exercise and spend far more than the 2 hours we are asking for.

Also take home tests introduce asymmetry. Even take home test takes one hour to do, it takes 5 minutes to check. So, company can go through more candidates, wasting their time. In traditional interview, for every hour candidate spends, the interviewer needs to spend the same amount of time. Therefore, it's forcing companies to choose candidates wisely.

Well, we have made the experience that people that are not seriously considering to take the job are filtered out by a homework. It helps both to save a lot of time and energy interviewing people.

I'm genuinely not trying to be snarky, but how can you say that with any certainty?

The only way to know this for sure would be to ask half your applicant pool to do the test, and the other half to go through the exact same battery of interviews sans take home test and then see how many of the offers you extend are accepted.

Obviously this requires that you're a big enough company to split your applicants into two pools and still have a big enough sample size.

Whenever I talk to people involved in hiring about this, they balk at the idea (for okay reasons -- in theory doing that would mean less people filtered out by homework and more applicants rejected during in person interviews that take up engineer time.)

I guess you are right, we haven’t done a proper A/B test for this. We had no homework before however, and the overall results were different. It is my strong feeling though that many cancel after seeing the homework that are not completely convinced, which is ok.

Yes, I've interviewed at companies that have interview type puzzles and coding, and take home tests. I greatly prefer the former regarding time use.

And, knowing the basic CS algorithms and data structures seems to be a good thing, since they make solving problems easier and lead to cleaner solutions. There's a reason they are considered the fundamentals in CS, even if they are baked into most languages nowadays.

> There's a reason [basic CS algorithms and data structures] are considered the fundamentals in CS, even if they are baked into most languages nowadays.

A linked list is such a fundamental piece of technology, and so obvious to anyone that's been working in a language for a while, that I feel it's perfectly acceptable to rule out a candidate who cannot write one.

It doesn't have to be perfect, and it doesn't have to have all of the optimizations and utility methods that you find in the standard libraries, but the ability to understand and work with a node that has a value and a pointer to the next node is kind of bare-minimum competency, isn't it?

The linked list is such a fundamental piece of technology that you never have to implement it.

I mean, I understand the linked list quite well, but in my multi decade software career, I've probably actually implemented one less than once a decade. So I think it's a very unrealistic interview question, and will sigh quite hard (internally) when asked to implement one in an interview.

You just can't please everyone...

I agree, if you implement a linked list in production code, you've almost certainly made a mistake.

My point is that a linked list is such a simple concept that anyone with real programming experience should be able to write a basic implementation.

It's a Shibboleth; I only care about your ability to perform the task because it tells me something else about you.

OK, I have to kinda agree.

It almost levels the playing field in the sense that since no one actually writes these things, we're probably all equally half clumsy with them :)

For linked lists I'd regard the question really being about whether the candidate understands pointers.

Fizzbuzz serves a similar role.

> The linked list is such a fundamental piece of technology that you never have to implement it.

Is this a good reason not to ask it in an interview?

I'd expect any competent software engineer to be able to implement a linked list without too much trouble. It's maybe not a great interview question (depending on your point of view, you may not consider it to contribute much positive or negative hiring signal), but I don't consider it a "gotcha" question the way a lot of people seem to.

When I do whiteboard questions, its never to see someone regurgitate a common question. Its just nice to see someone solve a problem and what their thought patterns are. CS is pretty much an art, would you hire a violinist without hearing them in person?

Would you ask a violinist to draw the chords they would play on a whiteboard, or would you hand them a violin?

No but I'd have an architect give me plans for a house written out. I'm not hiring artists I'm hiring engineer's. I'm not hiring your for your gorgeous code in x language, I'm hiring for problem solving skills and communication. And I do let people use computer or whiteboard, computer tends to more complicated logistically (wifi, preference of ide, power, logins, etc). A whiteboard only fails to work if I don't have new pens.

Software is far more art than you think, and rigid, formulaic thinking can be a detriment to good problem solving skills. Especially when solving something you can't just look up on the internet.

If your engineers aren't writing clean, readable, maintainable code that solves problems as simply as possible (ie, gorgeous), I'm not sure your hiring practices are doing you any good.

For Godsakes drop the architect - sw developer analogy already ! Its broken in so many ways. A developer must be able to produce code that works - compiles and runs and solves the problem at hand.

Bonus points for making code reusable, reliable, readable, testable, functional or what-the-heck-ever-able.

Unless you write code and run and compile it, there's nothing to be discussed.

> Would you ask a violinist to draw the chords they would play on a whiteboard, or would you hand them a violin?

The violin is not generally considered chordal instrument. While you can technically pluck all the strings at once, or bow two strings at once, it's most often used for melodic and not harmonic parts. ;)

You would of course, you can do the exact same questions on a whiteboard with a shared computer. In my experience of doing either, some people are better at one or the other, but the challenge is essentially the same.

Seems so simple to just say “let us know when you have 1 hour to do this take home and we will send it to you at that time. Sumbissions will be accepted for one hour after we send you the coding challenge”

Problem solved

I'd say in the list of companies, probably 2% of the 'take home projects' describe that. A one hour question is most of the time the phone screen or the replacement of it with an automated online exam.

When they say "take 1-2 hours on this" I take them at their word and do just that. On more that one occasion it has cost me an onsite.

Hacker rank allows a company to set up a time limited programming challenge. The company gets back a score based on how many of the tests were passed and the code itself.

Maybe not a bad means of ensuring that “this should only take an hour of your time” really means that.

The flip side is that fast and good aren’t one in the same, but I don’t think there’s any perfect answers here.

I've used similar online coding challenges, even proctored ones. I've had very mixed results, and the challengers are typically nearly identical to ones put on whiteboards. They are often used instead of phone screens.

A lot of these hacker- rank like coding tests often require some extensive preparation. I've used codility (I think that was the one ), and it actually mentioned that ideally it requires at least 2-3 weeks of preparation or more.

I’ve worked at three companies that usually had candidates complete take home assignments. The subjectivity is part of the point. They want you to only spend an hour or two so they can level you accurately and determine what the interview will look like, if there will be one at all. Most people submitting solutions are usually screened out because they’re empirically inexperienced or unsuited for the role. It’s a red flag if you took more time than suggested. If it’s a long assignment, you could simply say what you would work on next had you more time. If it’s a screening-type assignment you’ll be screened out, and if it’s not, you’ll be invited to onsite if what you said gels with the reviewer.

Most take home submissions I’ve seen are rejected — because of copy-pasted stack overflow code patched together, incorrect solutions, or poor style or organization.

I ran into exactly one company that attempted to get me to do a take-home; they were gibbering idiots, statistical imbeciles, and their company proved it in the 5-6 years since then. They're still around: a clown car run by frauds and mountebanks, powered by gas, hype and free labor.

The right way to do a take home exam if you must do this: give them something real and pay them consulting rates for it. If the result is good, you've hired a great worker. If the result is bad, you will know, they'll get a few bucks for their time, and no hard feelings. If you can't screen them to the point where you you can't screen for decent odds on a take home, you should consider a new career. Maybe picking potatoes.

And sometimes after you have spent so much time on take home exercise companies don’t even respond back.

Has happened to me. Was given an assignment that basically requires me to setup an entire ETL pipeline with full/incremental loading (with inputs varying from CSV/Json APIs etc), do data cleansing, create charts, data warehouse modelling + another coding assignment - all within a week's time. It was a very busy week and despite trying my best couldn't finish it. I sent what was completed - total silence with no feedback.

I don't want the front eng engineer reviewing this code and saying, OMG, this is so old, NOHIRE!"

I know trend-chasing seems to be common in the web development industry, but I would be wary of anyone who likes to make such changes for the sake of showing off or otherwise.

Question for all of the people claiming ageism because companies won't make special cases for folks with kids:

I have a dog. A young dog that requires a lot of work around the clock. Do you also think I deserve concessions?

How many nights and weekends should be uselessly wasted on LeetCode to get in shape before the whiteboard interview?

At least learning of new things in CSS will give you new useful knowledge which you can potentially apply in future.

How many nights and weekends should be uselessly wasted on homework for every interview?

At least whiteboard requieres practicing for real once in a life time.

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