Comment by ThalesX | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ThalesX | Hacker News Reader

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I wonder if that's why I wasn't a good fit for a recent company I interviewed with using a take-home assignment... bear in mind it's been at least a decade since I last took a take-home, so things might have changed.

I received the task on Friday evening, I spent the week-end thinking about the problem. Monday I had actual work and on Tuesday, I spent a day coming up with a shit implementation. Then, I started improving it for two days until I think it got in a good shape. I basically wanted to transmit that I can start from the base, add functionality and then iterate on the problem by documenting, refactoring, adding tests, evolving the code base etc.

So I'd say I worked for around 24 hours over 168 hours and the feedback I got was:

> Thank you so much for your interest in joining <redacted> and the time you took to submit the coding challenge. In reviewing your application though, I have decided not to invite you to the next round of interviews as I believe there are other candidates that are a better fit for what <redacted> needs right now.

This is turning into a subjective rant, part of me wants to delete this but I'm just gonna go ahead and finish it; When I was younger, I used to love take-home assignments because it felt better than just doing algorithms, and then I used to get proper feedback, what I did wrong, what aspects I could improve in the future etc. This feedback gives me nothing. Just the realization I wasted time.

You have to lie about take-home assignments. That is the accepted way.

I had a take home test that was to last 2 hours, and so I promised myself I would spend no longer on it. I provided a complete log of what I did minute by minute for a take home test for the last test I did as a defensive measure...

There was no break, no pondering, this was flat out knowing exactly what needed to be done and just typing constantly....

0:00 - started cloning

2:37 - finished cloning

3:11 - npm install

3:53 - localhost working

7:24 - removed timeout (intentional bug left in)

10:41 - Got images returned from the server (npm run serve)

13:27 - CSS started - thinking about design

22:26 - Grid for desktop

36:16 - Included user info

49:56 - responsive

56:37 - Added performance section

1:07 - Name form

1:21 - Email validation

1:35 - Most fields done. Need DOB

1:42 - DOB done

1:53 - form styling

1:57 - tidying up

2:01 - Saved this file

I didn't end up getting the job including feedback such as...

- Did not upload job search indicating repo to GitHub

- Didn't use `specific css attribute`

- Grid is rudimentary (the 11 minute one I made)

- HTML could be more semantic

- Form validation for name allows numbers (actually a programming falacy that names can technically be anything)

- Complaints about having multiple classes in one file.

I'm wondering exactly where I could have fit these in?

The week before I spent 4 hours on a task and delivered it within 12 hours of the assignment. I got an email with a single paragraph. `Unfortunately, after reviewing, the team has decided that they won't be moving forward to the next stage of the process with you`

These tests all have unrealistic expectations. I used to enjoy doing them for the learning experience, but now, it's just a solid graft with zero downtime coding the same app time after time.

So whenever I chat to a recruiter about the recruitment process I always drill down into the take home test, and the process of doing that let's them know that I won't be doing any take home tests. You have to simply question it sometimes and you can get it upgraded to a pair programming assignment which if you are honest, and have experience works in your favour.

Oh man that is a truly fantastic timeline. Thanks so much for sharing it. It really clarified for me why I can’t ever seem to get the take-home assignment done. I care too much!

I’ve withdrawn my application the last few times I’ve gotten task home assignments: I’d get to the 2 or 3 hour mark, realize I’m still working on clarifying my documentation (because I want to communicate that I consider this essential to a minimal product) and haven’t finished the feature(s) yet, call myself a shitty developer who is apparently an imposter, and then call it quits.

The folly is that if you did upload to github, they would have wanted to see steady commit history as well, which would have given away how much time you actually worked on it.

The key is lying because you already had a similar code base to use, most likely from interviewing so much you'd seen it before.

I actually didn't get a job for over-commiting. I hit a point where things were working, and wanted to be able to git-diff in VS Code, and they declined my application due to that.

I was going to push as well, as I wanted to make sure that was set up right, but they associated that with 'pushing untested code to production'

yeah its completely arbitrary and they don't tell you what they are going to be scoring by

but then they pretend its a meritocracy

I've probably burned some bridges this way, but whenever this has happened to me I've sent strongly worded messages to the recruiter and hiring manager. It probably goes nowhere, but I think it's time that we as an industry stop putting up with this shit.

It's also a great indication that it's not a company you want to work for anyway, but I don't have the stomach for accepting this level of disrespect towards applicants.

The only people who benefit from this situation are the people who have the luxury and freedom of 20 hours to spend on take-home projects. And even when I was that person once, I still hated it.

That's seriously impressive work – though it occurs to me that you didn’t account for all the time spent thinking about what you were going to do in the two hours. And the feed-back is hilariously bad.

I’ve often wished I’d focussed more on coding over system administration but reading accounts like this makes me happier about my recent career choices.

I had a take home a couple months ago. I'll spare you the details but if the output was to be non-hacky it was 4 or 5 days of work. I put in ~20 hrs, sent it back and said, "Here's where I'm at. I'd love to finish it but it's not reasonable to expect so much time if the final answer might be 'No thanks.' I'm not into such waterfalls..."

To this I'll add, I have a saying: "How you hire, is who you hire."

40 hrs? Waterfall? 2021?? And we all have been led to believe dinosaurs are extinct :)

Same here. Quite a long time ago I got a take-home assignment. It's about setting up a router on a linux-based machine. I was going with a design that focused on maintenance and understanding, so I decided not to use iptables directly. After a few days I gave up, because there was an issue with the upstream distribution that I was not aware of. I actually had a very good setup after the _deadline_, but it's too late.

I would never do take-home assignment again =))

I always do better with take-home assignments than I do with a whiteboard or live-coding interview.

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