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The problem with any take-home test, ESPECIALLY one that you only expect to take 2 hours, is that you hand people an advantage who do have more time to spend on
by mattbee 9y ago
The problem with any take-home test, ESPECIALLY one that you only expect to take 2 hours, is that you hand people an advantage who do have more time to spend on it.
That was what stopped us doing it, and started looking at reasonable tests that you can't prepare for, and can't spend more than the allotted time on. So that means we weave the testing into a 1-2 hours interview, and everyone has the same chance.
(we also document our process so you can see what you're getting into before you start)
https://careers.bytemark.co.uk/full-process https://careers.bytemark.co.uk/full-process
- cimmanom 9y agoI don't love that approach. There are lots of people who can do the work well in a reasonable amount of time but don't test well under intense time pressure. We do require candidates to use version control and (though we don't tell them so) we review individual commits to understand the candidate's approach and how they use version control, and commit timestamps to see how long implementation took them. And the volume of candidates who pass both resume review and phone screen in our process is low enough that we're not usually comparing candidates to one another; it's "can you do the job or not". So relative advantages aren't such a big deal.
- some_account 9y agoTime pressure always make me perform a lot worse, on programming tests as well as iq tests. I did an iq test that was not timed and got 10 points higher, which is quite significant and also much more how real life problem solving works as a programmer. I'm never under any time pressure in my job.