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Exactly. Their example: > "Create a single page app that lets me enter movies in my home movie collection, store them in offline storage and search through the

Exactly. Their example: > "Create a single page app that lets me enter movies in my home movie collection, store them in offline storage and search through them. I want to search by Genre, Title & Actors." Significantly more than 2 hours, unless you are looking for a quick hack and for the candidate to repeatedly explain "I would have done it this other way if I had more time..."

silverbax88 10y ago
I completely agree. I saw that and thought - um, that's not a 2 hour job unless you want a massively hacked together app. I might be able to do something modestly decent over a weekend, but 2 hours? Nope. You have to have ways of inputting/verifying data, tagging genres, etc. I've done a lot of similar code but that's why I know it's basic, but not quick. It would let me know that the job wasn't going to last because of the lack of knowledge in estimating software development.
ebrenes 10y ago
That's only if you're expecting a candidate to provide a perfect solution; and don't make it clear that the time limit should inform their design and not just measure their speed of implementation. Part of software development is tailoring a solution to the scope of the problem, and this includes taking into account the time and effort available to come up with a solution. Someone who looks at that problem statement and designs something that will take a week has missed a very important requirement. You could reasonably scale up any problem to take an arbitrarily long amount of time, by adding onerous requirements (must have 7 9's of reliability). What I've found more rare and precious is the developer who can limit the scope so that items that are not up for negotiation like time (2 hours) & resources (1 developer) are respected. I fully expect a developer to state their assumptions up front, so that I can judge their design based on the stated assumptions and not some unstated imaginary assumptions. It also lets me see how or if they prioritize.

silverbax88 10y ago

I completely agree. I saw that and thought - um, that's not a 2 hour job unless you want a massively hacked together app. I might be able to do something modestly decent over a weekend, but 2 hours? Nope. You have to have ways of inputting/verifying data, tagging genres, etc. I've done a lot of similar code but that's why I know it's basic, but not quick. It would let me know that the job wasn't going to last because of the lack of knowledge in estimating software development.

ebrenes 10y ago

That's only if you're expecting a candidate to provide a perfect solution; and don't make it clear that the time limit should inform their design and not just measure their speed of implementation. Part of software development is tailoring a solution to the scope of the problem, and this includes taking into account the time and effort available to come up with a solution. Someone who looks at that problem statement and designs something that will take a week has missed a very important requirement. You could reasonably scale up any problem to take an arbitrarily long amount of time, by adding onerous requirements (must have 7 9's of reliability). What I've found more rare and precious is the developer who can limit the scope so that items that are not up for negotiation like time (2 hours) & resources (1 developer) are respected. I fully expect a developer to state their assumptions up front, so that I can judge their design based on the stated assumptions and not some unstated imaginary assumptions. It also lets me see how or if they prioritize.