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Comment by whatamidoingyo | Hacker News Reader

> That's the point at which I would have stopped the process personally.

Why is that? I love take-home assignments. At least, if it's just an initial get-to-know-you interview, and then the assignment. What I utterly despise is the get-to-know-you interview, then a tech interview with the entire dev team, then a take-home, then a meeting with the CTO.

I will never, ever, ever go through with any job that has an interview process like this again. I always ask up-front what their interview process is like.

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If a take-home or anything else (automated half-hour online test or whatever) taking more than a couple minutes and not requiring as much time investment from them as you comes before they've winnowed down much of the field—if it's used as any kind of screener—I'd be out. That time's better spent sending more applications (or, IDK, drilling leetcode) if there are more than a very-few candidates still in the running for a given position.

If you want early stage bulk screeners, go for it, I'm sure you need them, but don't take much of my time or the math don't math.

Because it's time theft?

Why would I spend 4 hours (in the best case scenario, otherwise days) on the very first step of the application process, where, regardless of my resume, I have an extremely high chance to be rejected, while the company puts literally no time in?

Well, that's different. If it's a super challenging take-home, with requirements that exceed 1 page, then yeah, I'd agree. Most take-homes that I've received have been super simple, though. And they're usually not the first step, but the final step, in my experience.

Simple does not mean short. I can give you a one line take-home assignment that will take a lifetime to build.

In any case, if it exceeds one or two HOURS, it's too long. And I have never seen a take-home assignment that did not.

(some companies pay for your time for take-home assignments, obviously that changes everything)

I've been at a past company where we (well, mostly I) set up a take-home that would take a mid-level web dev familiar with the material maybe 15-30 minutes to knock out, basically just to test if candidates could produce responsive CSS layouts and knew how to make a proper web form work. It was wild how many we got back that still didn't account for basic (explicitly outlined) use cases like 'works on a phone screen'.

A take home should come with a project already set up that you're asked to modify.

Most don't and they waste your time setting up all the boilerplate.

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