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As someone who has given take-home tests let me answer these for you: - Unit tests? Yes. It will increase your standing. - Docs? Absolutely. A must have. You

As someone who has given take-home tests let me answer these for you: - Unit tests? Yes. It will increase your standing. - Docs? Absolutely. A must have. You will not be considered really otherwise. - Deployment? See above. - Support 5k requests? Not unless that is what the test is testing for, pay attention during phone interview about the role and it's requirements, the test will look for this and other generalizations. - Clean code? Very, very important. Don't try to show how smart you are, show how audience aware you are. Most likely you will be working on a team, a team doesn't want a cowboy programmer. Something you didn't mention but bodes really well for anything with a front-end interface: hosting. Executives hate running things themselves, so a hosted version will put you at the top of the list.

mjfisher 7y ago
It's probably worth mentioning that any take home worth its salt will explicitly list what criteria you're being assessed on. It's crazy how many coding tests are poorly designed and waste a candidate's time. I'm putting together a list of good practice for test design here: https://candidatecode.com/articles/coding_challenge_best_practice_checklist https://candidatecode.com/articles/coding_challenge_best_pra... Feedback and contributions welcome
- graphememes 7y ago
  A lot of the time they are left out to see how experienced the individual is working in the environment. What do they think is the most important (outside of the outlined criteria)? Treat it as if they are testing your experience, not your literal skill in pumping out code. Anyone can pump out code.
  - mjfisher 7y ago
    The issue there is the problem starts to become unbounded for the candidate; they can't tell what you're looking for, so they don't know how to prioritize their time. That's a problem even if you have reasonable expectations yourself, because the candidate probably has experienced some tests where the expectations haven't been reasonable. For a (real) example: marking candidates down for not having an analytics integration. How does your candidate know that's not important to you, even though it was important to the last company? > testing your experience, not your literal skill in pumping out code Past a certain point, it gets much more efficient to discuss experience in an interview setting. Good coding tests should be designed to test the skills you care about most to produce a strong hiring signal for the next phase - it's difficult to showcase a full decade's worth of experience in 4-8 hours' worth of coding challenge. > Anyone can pump out code I've found that to be depressingly untrue amongst a significant percentage of engineering applicants.
james_s_tayler 7y ago
I like how this is what interviewers are looking for and then you get hired and there are no tests, the code is a mess and the performance sucks.
- graphememes 7y ago
  That's why they look for it ;)
- raverbashing 7y ago
  And they ask a hard algorithmic/CS problem then your job is to build CRUD interfaces
  - james_s_tayler 7y ago
    You nailed it.
partyboat1586 7y ago
Clean code is so subjective it hurts. Being audience aware basically means trying to guess the company and interviewers coding style from minimal information.

mjfisher 7y ago

It's probably worth mentioning that any take home worth its salt will explicitly list what criteria you're being assessed on. It's crazy how many coding tests are poorly designed and waste a candidate's time. I'm putting together a list of good practice for test design here: https://candidatecode.com/articles/coding_challenge_best_practice_checklist https://candidatecode.com/articles/coding_challenge_best_pra... Feedback and contributions welcome

graphememes 7y ago
A lot of the time they are left out to see how experienced the individual is working in the environment. What do they think is the most important (outside of the outlined criteria)? Treat it as if they are testing your experience, not your literal skill in pumping out code. Anyone can pump out code.
- mjfisher 7y ago
  The issue there is the problem starts to become unbounded for the candidate; they can't tell what you're looking for, so they don't know how to prioritize their time. That's a problem even if you have reasonable expectations yourself, because the candidate probably has experienced some tests where the expectations haven't been reasonable. For a (real) example: marking candidates down for not having an analytics integration. How does your candidate know that's not important to you, even though it was important to the last company? > testing your experience, not your literal skill in pumping out code Past a certain point, it gets much more efficient to discuss experience in an interview setting. Good coding tests should be designed to test the skills you care about most to produce a strong hiring signal for the next phase - it's difficult to showcase a full decade's worth of experience in 4-8 hours' worth of coding challenge. > Anyone can pump out code I've found that to be depressingly untrue amongst a significant percentage of engineering applicants.

james_s_tayler 7y ago

I like how this is what interviewers are looking for and then you get hired and there are no tests, the code is a mess and the performance sucks.

graphememes 7y ago
That's why they look for it ;)
raverbashing 7y ago
And they ask a hard algorithmic/CS problem then your job is to build CRUD interfaces
- james_s_tayler 7y ago
  You nailed it.

partyboat1586 7y ago

Clean code is so subjective it hurts. Being audience aware basically means trying to guess the company and interviewers coding style from minimal information.