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People seem to argue about the wrong things. I am not advocating for abolishing the practice of take home assignments. Far from it. However it has become a com
by mathverse 4y ago
People seem to argue about the wrong things. I am not advocating for abolishing the practice of take home assignments. Far from it.
However it has become a common practice to require from applicants unreasonable amount of time to complete said assignments without any commitmet from the company. That's just toxic.
This would not have been such a big problem if companies provided decent feedback on what went wrong with your assignment.
- zaphar 4y agoI use a take home exercise. It should take at most 30m to 1h to complete. I have a well calibrated objective scoring system for the exercise. It's trivial to figure out if someone copied it from elsewhere. I find it works pretty well at getting the "can they code" portion hiring process out of the way.
- ghaff 4y ago>unreasonable amount of time to complete said assignments One problem is that take home assignments are, barring some sort of time-gated online tool, open-ended in terms of time spent. Sure, maybe you can "meet the requirements" in a couple hours. But someone else will handle all the edge cases and optimize the code by spending a weekend on it. I do a lot of writing and if you ask me to write 1,000 words on $TOPIC, I can probably do so in a couple hours. It will almost certainly be better if I work on it over a couple of days. ADDED: Having said that, while I tend not to be a fan of take home assignments, if I'm hiring someone whose job is going to be, to any significant degree, writing for external consumption, I'm going to need a writing sample. And, if they don't have anything suitable, they're going to have to create one on the topic of their choosing.