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Comment by kaashif | Hacker News Reader

I think take-home projects might take the same amount of time as leetcode, when you count studying, but are much less stressful. As long as enough time is given.

This really doesn't fix the problem of breaking into CS, and it's not even practical when there are too many candidates. Leetcode gives a gigantic number of false negatives, but that's a price companies are willing to pay.

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I don't agree. I much prefer to spend one hour doing a live coding interview than spending 24h working on a test. It is much more time spent, and therefore more stressful.

If you can ace a 1 hour coding interview without any preparation then more power to you! But many of us have to spend months doing practice problems to perform well in that 1 hour interview. I’ve heard many stories of people doing hundreds of practice problems to pass these kinds of interviews.

I’d much rather dedicate a weekend to solve a take home challenge using technologies I already know than dedicate many months to learn a set of algorithms I would rarely use.

I make a point of never doing "projects" during a recruitment process. The fact is that there are too many good opportunities out there that will not require me two spend a full day or even several days in a week to complete a job application, without compensation. Whenever I hear that there is a "project" to complete, I just tell them that I already have tons of projects to work on and pass the "opportunity".

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