> You might like
https://codereview.stackexchange.comWorth a shot! I initially thought about it myself but I hesitate to use codereview - from my network, everyone has reddit and HN accounts. Very few have SE accounts but could be a sampling bias though.
> I would certainly never complete one I thought was directly related to the business and what they were looking for was free consulting.
This reminds me of a few interviews from 2018 right here from "Who is hiring?"! One was a WeWork clone from NYC that was a coworking space and needed a dashboard of issues at that coworking space that their members would then get to vote and comment on reddit style. You could take my assignment and deploy to Vercel (that's how I did the demo to make it easy to test.)
They rejected me, as feedback said "it was too complicated", and promptly took my code without any modifications and put it up under their domain. Thankfully this was in the U.S. but if this company was outside the U.S. I would practically have had no recourse. Maybe the E.U. has strong employee laws but how would I, from the U.S., even go about taking action against a company in Sweden or Norway using my code without authorization?
> I would likely refuse to complete one that was extensive or complex enough that feedback wwould not be expected or required.
I'm unsure if there's any take home assignment that's not complex enough that feedback is expected or required. Let's take the simple FizzBuzz.
- Are they looking whether you can simply code at all?
- Are they looking whether you can do pattern matching in the language of your choice?
- Are they looking whether you can do dynamic dispatch or understand functional programming?
- Are they looking whether you can write the code in an extensible way such that in additional to 3 and 5, it's easy to add in additional behavior for 7, 9 and 15?
If there are some assignments that are simple enough that feedback is not expected or required, please share and also what position it was for.
One company asked me to write a webservice that would increment a counter and gave me 3 hours to turn it in. I asked them whether they expected to deploy it behind a load balancer and be resilient to crashes. Whether they wanted a "close to production ready" solution or something we could work on iteratively.
They told me to not overthink it, that we could iterate on it - so I turned it in an hour - it accepted a GET (fetch current counter value), a PUT (increment it by 1), and a POST (create initial counter). It was literally an in-memory counter that could take any type (int, long, a custom large number), call its get, "increment" and init method respectively.
They rejected my assignment right away saying that the position was for a staff engineer and they could not accept an in-memory counter and expected that the staff engineer would turn in a solution that used persistence.
I assumed they would have gotten back to me and said "ok, we can see you can code a webservice but now instead of an in-memory counter, use persistence".