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Awesome to read about you turning this into your own startup. One thing I came to think about regarding the "4-5 hours" and throwing 5 working days on it, is t

by hising 7y ago

Awesome to read about you turning this into your own startup. One thing I came to think about regarding the "4-5 hours" and throwing 5 working days on it, is that, maybe as an interviewer it is quite obvious that you put more than 4-5 hours into it and what they were "really" after were the trade-offs you would have made if you put 4-5 hours into it. Just a thought.

dannyw 7y ago
Not Google, but similar company and can confirm. If you spend 5x the amount of time we suggest, it’s obvious and the expectations scale a lot, lot higher than if you just spent 5 hours.
- gowld 7y ago
  So I should spend a few more hours going back to add flaws to make it look like I spent less time?
avip 7y ago
This makes no sense for "product design". Just thinking about it, looking at existing similar products, before you even grab your napkin, takes 4 hours.
allenu 7y ago
Yeah, it may translate into, "well, if I work with this person, are they going to spend way too much on details that I don't need and burn themselves out just trying to please me?" Part of working is being able to be assertive and say "ok, for only 4-5 hours, here's what I was able to do for you, so now let's figure out next steps".
- gowld 7y ago
  Yeah, I hate hiring people who are interested in what we are doing and are excited to work on it. It's one thing to accept that some people are busy and shouldn't be punished, a bout are we supposed to only hire people who have zero excitement for the industry and job?
  - allenu 7y ago
    That wasn't really my point. My point is that when you are working on a team, it's a collaborative experience and if your superior asks you to do a task a certain way, there may be a good reason why. The exercise here may have been to see what ideas you could generate about the user experience and less about aesthetic polish of a final product. I got the sense from the post that the author spent a lot of detail in making it look aesthetically pleasing, which is only one part of user experience design. A larger part of it is design something easy to use and understand. Sure, feel free to spend extra time on the take-home assignment to signal to the potential employer you are passionate, but that's a different thing.

by hising 7y ago

dannyw 7y ago

Not Google, but similar company and can confirm. If you spend 5x the amount of time we suggest, it’s obvious and the expectations scale a lot, lot higher than if you just spent 5 hours.

gowld 7y ago
So I should spend a few more hours going back to add flaws to make it look like I spent less time?

avip 7y ago

This makes no sense for "product design". Just thinking about it, looking at existing similar products, before you even grab your napkin, takes 4 hours.

allenu 7y ago

Yeah, it may translate into, "well, if I work with this person, are they going to spend way too much on details that I don't need and burn themselves out just trying to please me?" Part of working is being able to be assertive and say "ok, for only 4-5 hours, here's what I was able to do for you, so now let's figure out next steps".

gowld 7y ago
Yeah, I hate hiring people who are interested in what we are doing and are excited to work on it. It's one thing to accept that some people are busy and shouldn't be punished, a bout are we supposed to only hire people who have zero excitement for the industry and job?
- allenu 7y ago
  That wasn't really my point. My point is that when you are working on a team, it's a collaborative experience and if your superior asks you to do a task a certain way, there may be a good reason why. The exercise here may have been to see what ideas you could generate about the user experience and less about aesthetic polish of a final product. I got the sense from the post that the author spent a lot of detail in making it look aesthetically pleasing, which is only one part of user experience design. A larger part of it is design something easy to use and understand. Sure, feel free to spend extra time on the take-home assignment to signal to the potential employer you are passionate, but that's a different thing.