>> advised that we should spend no more that 3–5 hours on the task
I have to wonder if they didn't get the position because they spent more than the advised time for the task.
I have to wonder if they didn't get the position because they spent more than the advised time for the task.
If I asked a candidate to spend 4 hours on something and they come back to me with 40 hours of work, it isn't what I asked for. Despite it being potentially amazing, that person ignored the task.
A 4-hour task would probably yield 1-3 mockups. Maybe a launch/splash page, the home leaderboard page, and then a page showing the details of a specific user.
Even these 3 pages would be pushing your 4 hour time limit, but that is really the most I would expect.
So if I was interviewing and comparing candidates and one candidate submits a 40-60 hour project while the other candidates submitted a 4 hour project. I can't really compare the two. I would probably throw out the guy that ignore what I asked them to do by spending 40-60 hours of work on something I only wanted 4 hours of work on.
Maybe the same situation applies in Design somehow? I mean yeah it takes 4 hours to make the product if you happen to have all the graphical elements you will be using already downloaded and organized.
on edit: although I have noticed a disappointment in some places that I have not done a lot of time cleaning up the code after writing it and making everything beautiful and writing a good readme to tell them everything to do and so on and so forth and normally I don't do those things because I spent more than 4 hours because there was stuff that needed fixing and anyway if they wanted all that 4 hours would not be enough.
Coding is like math homework. When your doing the math homework you know when your done, it's very obvious and anyone can check your work and clearly see it's either right or wrong.
Design is like a book report for English class, it's bottomless and can always be improved given more time, albeit with diminishing returns. Design challenges are evil and bullshit, you can poor hundreds of hours into a design challenge and still iterate further.
But people complain that I am not done with the programming assignment if I have not made it DRY enough, or put in tests, or done a readme outlining more advanced than run npm install then do npm run start.
Programming assignments may not be infinitely improvable but they can often be improved, I just don't consider it worth the effort to improve the work before submitting
Agreed, unless they want a good polished solutions, meaning it has been refactored, has decent comments, is well tested, etc.... then it becomes a lot like design where the sky is the limit.
My wife got her first job in the states because of a take home design challenge. Other companies were wary of her because of her foreign degree and no US experience, and she was able to show off in the design challenge they gave her (she spent more time than estimated, but not incredibly much more than that). In this case, it really worked out for her.
If that makes them look like assholes, yeah, I can see why someone would feel that way but at least they are clear about their intentions and not insulting anyone's intelligence in the process.
It'd be more useful to know they could execute roughly what I'd expect in 3-5 hours. As in they think quickly, come up with something, get the basics down and are ready to progress or not.
...Of course, if they're doing it at home they could spend 3-5 days on something I'd spend 3-5 hours on and I'd never know...