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One thing I've been wondering lately about take-home tasks is how everybody complains about time estimates, and yet here's a bunch of "small projects" which som

One thing I've been wondering lately about take-home tasks is how everybody complains about time estimates, and yet here's a bunch of "small projects" which someone pretends to have very precisely estimated. Unfortunately, most companies fail to honestly estimate the cost of the tasks they assign for these processes. Many of them because they just don't take into account numerous small tasks that the candidate will need to deal with. I've seen a lot of these tasks ask for setup instructions, good unit tests, explaining any decisions you make, etc. In case there's any visual user interface (e.g. some web component) they also ask for it to be nice, as in "we don't want a designer but we need you to make it somewhat nice". And then they'll say it should take just a couple of hours. I've also seen a fair number of others casually say their task should only take about 8 hours. And I can do that on my free time on five consecutive days, after having worked already 8 hours each day. Sure thing.

asdff 6y ago
I would never apply for a job that made me do a homework assignment. This is a huge red flag that this employer doesn't value your life outside of work at all.
malechimp 6y ago
I've done this a couple of times. All for German companies in Germany. The last one took me a weekend. They liked it and booked me a ticket for on-site. Where they whiteboarded the hell out of me and rejected me on the basis of not getting the right answer fast enough and using wrong syntax in a couple of statements. And there was not a single question about the take-home project. After that I just decided I'm not going to put the time and effort in that sh*t anymore. I'm not even going to go out of my way to accommodate interviews in my working hours. Next time it happened I replied back that I'm not interested. For the record, they wanted a silly automation in AWS and kubernetes. Most of the time would go to setup everything up as my future-employer assumed that I had an AWS account and that AWS is the only cloud that matters. (I work on a different provider daily). Both times it was automotive-related IT. Dunno if that's something to do with it. My take-away so far: Whiteboard sucks but at least it respects your time while the take-home proj does not necessarily keeps you from wb and is usually ridiculous to a large extent.
VonGallifrey 6y ago
> One thing I've been wondering lately about take-home tasks is how everybody complains about time estimates, and yet here's a bunch of "small projects" which someone pretends to have very precisely estimated. When I interviewed people and gave them a take home assignment I was very confident in my estimate for one simple reason: I completed the tasks myself. We had 4 tasks for this for the 4 different types of jobs we hired for. The "estimate" was just double the time I needed to do the task myself. We got feedback from some of the candidates that our estimate was very good. If I could always estimate the time AFTER I complete the task instead of before then estimation would not be hard at all.
- genezeta 6y ago
  Good for you; not everybody does that :) If you don't mind me asking, how big were those tasks?
  - VonGallifrey 6y ago
    We gave the estimation as follows: - Junior developers should be able to finish this within a work day (8 hours) - If you are already familiar with all technologies involved then it should take about 2 hours even with all optional tasks completed. As an example our backend dev task was to parse a CSV file (supplied with the task) and provide 2 API endpoints (return format and url defined in the task) that access this data (free choice in language and libraries). The optional tasks for this was to include unittests and to use docker. That really isn't much work. We did get some good feedback about this estimate both from junior developers and seniors after they were hired or rejected. Most seniors seem to complete this task in about 1.5h to 3h and juniors do seem to be able to complete this in about 6h.

asdff 6y ago

I would never apply for a job that made me do a homework assignment. This is a huge red flag that this employer doesn't value your life outside of work at all.

malechimp 6y ago

I've done this a couple of times. All for German companies in Germany. The last one took me a weekend. They liked it and booked me a ticket for on-site. Where they whiteboarded the hell out of me and rejected me on the basis of not getting the right answer fast enough and using wrong syntax in a couple of statements. And there was not a single question about the take-home project. After that I just decided I'm not going to put the time and effort in that sh*t anymore. I'm not even going to go out of my way to accommodate interviews in my working hours. Next time it happened I replied back that I'm not interested. For the record, they wanted a silly automation in AWS and kubernetes. Most of the time would go to setup everything up as my future-employer assumed that I had an AWS account and that AWS is the only cloud that matters. (I work on a different provider daily). Both times it was automotive-related IT. Dunno if that's something to do with it. My take-away so far: Whiteboard sucks but at least it respects your time while the take-home proj does not necessarily keeps you from wb and is usually ridiculous to a large extent.

VonGallifrey 6y ago

> One thing I've been wondering lately about take-home tasks is how everybody complains about time estimates, and yet here's a bunch of "small projects" which someone pretends to have very precisely estimated. When I interviewed people and gave them a take home assignment I was very confident in my estimate for one simple reason: I completed the tasks myself. We had 4 tasks for this for the 4 different types of jobs we hired for. The "estimate" was just double the time I needed to do the task myself. We got feedback from some of the candidates that our estimate was very good. If I could always estimate the time AFTER I complete the task instead of before then estimation would not be hard at all.

genezeta 6y ago
Good for you; not everybody does that :) If you don't mind me asking, how big were those tasks?
- VonGallifrey 6y ago
  We gave the estimation as follows: - Junior developers should be able to finish this within a work day (8 hours) - If you are already familiar with all technologies involved then it should take about 2 hours even with all optional tasks completed. As an example our backend dev task was to parse a CSV file (supplied with the task) and provide 2 API endpoints (return format and url defined in the task) that access this data (free choice in language and libraries). The optional tasks for this was to include unittests and to use docker. That really isn't much work. We did get some good feedback about this estimate both from junior developers and seniors after they were hired or rejected. Most seniors seem to complete this task in about 1.5h to 3h and juniors do seem to be able to complete this in about 6h.