Ask HN: Have data-science/engineering take-home assignments have changed?
In my previous job hunts, the take home component had questions that were concrete and/or narrowly bounded. There could be some leetcode-esque coding problems, some questions about "what does this chunk of code do?", or "can you tell me the pros/cons of X vs Y technique?". As an interviewee, I actually liked these assignments because it replaced the stress of live white-boarding with fun puzzles I could do at my own pace. And as a interviewer whos company often used take-homes like this I felt like these questions provided good signal about technical ability and communication skills.
But now things feel different. The take-home problems are completely open-ended and underspecified, like "Explore this dataset and tell me something about it" or "How would you design a system for working with X data". At first this sounds liberating because it will let you showcase your creativity, but it turns out that the open endedness is a real pain. The stated aim of these open-ended problem is usually something like "real problems at work aren't clear cut, so we want to see how you approach something ambiguous". That's true, but it would be much better to do that in the live in-person portion of the interview. A few issues I keep having are:
* Because there's no scoping or definition of done, you never reach a point where you can be confident that you've done enough to meet the hiring manager's bar. So you just keep going and going. The instructions usually have a line tacked on at the end that says "this should only take two hours", but if you actually want the job you won't abide by that (and if you do abide by the time limits, you'll hurt your chance because you're being compared against the people that didn't)
* There's no indication of who the audience is or how you'll be evaluated, so you don't know whether they want you to condense/summarize complex things for a non-technical audience OR do they want you to provide all the nitty-gritty technical detail to show that you know what you're doing?
* The problem will always require making assumptions, and you're forced between choosing a simplifying assumption (that makes the problem more tractable and shows how pragmatic you are) or a non-simplifying assumption (that makes the problem harder but gives you a chance to show off something fancy if you're willing to spend the time). Because everybody doing the assignment will make different assumptions (either implicitly or explicitly), you can never really compare one solution to another.
I'm curious if a) anybody else noticed a shift in these assignments and b) whether the change I'm seeing is something widespread or just due to a change in the types of jobs I'm applying for (different seniority level, slightly different industry).