While the example was bad (too general, a potential for copy&paste from somewhere else), it was certainly not for the reason OP wrote: > The exercise was suppo

While the example was bad (too general, a potential for copy&paste from somewhere else), it was certainly not for the reason OP wrote: > The exercise was supposed to take "a few hours" according to the hiring manager, but I'm extremely rusty with ASP. Well, if they look for an ASP expert, this self-selection saves time on both sides! I use take-home assignments with boilerplate code, to reduce the initial time investment and make it easier to compare parts of the projects. (Otherwise, it may be a too open-ended task.) I try to make sure that the skills I require the skills I need. For example, when I needed a deep learning engineer (for a PyTorch project), I expect fluency in at least one deep learning framework. I made it explicit that instead PyTorch boilerplate then can use any other framework (a few people send in Keras). Yes, people can Google things (good!). And it some sense it balances more junior people (but willing to put more effort) with people with more experience. The later could be told easily by interview. When I ask questions about their solutions, it is easy to see which parts are done with understanding, which - not.