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In my experience a (not timeboxed) 4 hours coding assignment will actually take at least a day.

Is not necessary malicious from those companies, they just underestimate the time their test take.

IMO, most engineers massively under-estimate the time it takes to do "simple" tasks if you don't already have the infrastructure/environment set up for it.

And some times they assume specific or latest versions of some platform because they are currently working on it. I remember some flink take home required some latest api, while i have worked with flink in earlier versions. It took me 4h just to go through the updated documentation, while it was supposed to be an 1h one.

This is why I prefer in person coding exercises. You can do 1-1.5 hours of a "4 hour timeboxed coding assignment" and the interviewer will usually be happy that theyve seen enough and that you're not too slow coz they watched you do it.

Thats 3-8 hours of your life back.

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