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Comment by 3oH2y869 | Hacker News Reader

I'm in FE, and FE interviews can be like this so much. "Here's a takehome for something that in reality would take a week to complete but do it in an hour and don't spend more time on that!"

And I'm like.. an hour is not long enough to implement any reasonable webapp... I have no idea if other people went over or not, and it almost feels like a test of commitment (if I was serious I would take the actual 4 hours it would take and pretend I did it in 1 or something like that).

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Yeah even a basic to do list or calculator web app can take several hours if it’s your first time with the specified framework, build tool or CSS library.

Given the diversity of FE it’s quite likely for a take home project to hit one of those criteria.

> ... if it’s your first time with the specified framework, build tool or CSS library.

Depending on the position they may been testing specifically to filter people out who are using a tool for the first time. If I'm hiring a Senior Flutter Developer then it better not be their first time using Flutter.

Unless we're talking about something truly enterprise (Magento at 4 million lines of PHP dependency injected MVVC hell comes to mind) or very obtuse (hiring ocaml devs to work on their compiler) senior means senior engineer, I don't care what you worked on to be honest. Senior perl engineers can flip to ruby in month and be totally proficient. A good Java programmer with 10 years experience will have plenty to bring to the table in C++ .

If you are a senior developer and haven't seen half a dozen frameworks, tool sets, or languages under your belt. What value are you in 2 years when we shift gears

I don't know about Flutter, but my issue with these takehomes in a React world is that React is extremely basic. It is only a view renderer, and leaves up to you all difficult questions of: routing, CSS, components, data fetching, state management, even things like how files are organized and named are up to you. As a React candidate, your takehome probably touches on all of these topics, and you (rightfully) probably want to express some kind of proficiency in most/all of these areas. The more senior you are, the more likely you have opinionated ways of doing these things. But in an hour long span, you are left with two uncomfortable options:

1. Write it all yourself. Express those opinions as clearly and bug free as you can. Try to get it all in as much as you can and give up on finishing all the features in the spec. Definitely give up on the UI looking nice -- despite what anyone says, default HTML is not pretty.

2. Use OSS libraries. Are you actively up to date on OSS libraries handling these things? If you're a working React professional, you probably are not, because you're using whatever system your company uses. Do those OSS libraries properly express what you think is good code? And what does it say about you to use those OSS libraries? Do you look like someone who actually understands React and understands those tradeoffs, or do you look like the kind of person that creates the type of React app that HN is always complaining about, one with a billion dependencies?

Sorry if I sound ranty. It's not directed at you. I've just been dealing with a lot of these this week.

the worst part about it is that when they give a time limit they make it sound like they're doing you a favor.

"we have a takehome, but don't worry! it's just a quick little thing that should just take an hour to throw together. we're not like those other companies that give you a huge task"

Exactly. Then I've been wondering, how many people are actually going over the time? Are the reviewers actually checking any time stamps?

What can they realistically check?

I see two data points they could have: time when the template was downloaded (assuming it’s a unique link only you can access, and you didn’t download it > once/all downloads are logged) or emailed, and the time it was submitted.

All other time stamps can be spoofed.

No, I agree. I just mean like when they say, hey this will take 2 hours, how do they know? Do they even care? Or just everyone cheats and does more than the allotted time?

I did one take home that was timed in coderpad. I thought that was a little more fair.

They have no idea how long they take. They come up with a task first and then slap a time limit on it afterwards so they don’t feel bad about asking too much.

This is explicitly what bootcamp graduates are asked to do. It’s possible, they were just filtering out candidates that can’t work that fast.

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