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How to politely decline a take-home test task

xwdv 4y ago
My advice: if you take 3 hours just to set up a virtual environment for our take home test, save yourself the embarrassment and cancel your interview.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- vorpalhex 4y ago
  Before I started refusing these, I did one that was an integration with the companies sdk. The sdk was broken! So I produced a minimum viable repro, wrote up a bug report and even included an analysis of where the bug was. The company had the gall to still ask me to do a take home using the patched sdk! If your take home test is broken, stupid or not trivial to setup, it's not the applicant who is at fault.
  - pydry 4y ago
    That's amazing. It's like a red flag made out of red flags.
  - swader999 4y ago
    The hiring process works both ways. In this case they failed and you're time spent prevented a lot of future grief.
    - swader999 4y ago
      OMG your.
  - Kwpolska 4y ago
    While there exist companies that overdo it and expect weird things like that, I believe the majority of companies expect something simple — if you’re applying to be a <rolls dice> Rails backend developer, you would probably be asked to build some simple API with a couple endpoints. And if you are applying for that position, you should know how to set up Ruby (and you should probably have it installed on your laptop, even if you aren’t doing much coding outside of work/for fun/in open-source projects), install Rails, create an app, and write the simple endpoints. The OOP seems to be struggling with something like that (and “virtual environment” smells very Pythony to me — even though Python packaging is a trainwreck, someone applying for a Python job shouldn’t need 3+ hours to set things up for a simple project.)
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    Sending a valid, minimal reproduction case in the highest possible score on the take-home in my book. The take home is designed to efficiently weed out the hopelessly unqualified (of which the applicant pool is unsurprisingly over-represented). You clearly passed that test and, by asking a second time, the company saved you a bunch of further wasted time.
- swader999 4y ago
  That's not really fair, a lot of good devs just don't work with vms, downloading all the bits could take up half of that time.
- mhitza 4y ago
  I'll give you a counter example. I've worked extensively with the symfony framework (10+ years at this point), and clearly remember a company I've applied to a couple of years back guesstimating that the take home assignment is going to take 2-3 hours tops to complete. And the requirements might be reasonable for an already setup project, but when you have to do it from zero; unless you're scaffolding new symfony projects every time a new release is out, you're going to waste at least an hour scaffolding/googling/installing/wiring up all the dependencies/auth/orm you might need for you flow. It's not as bad as within the NodeJS ecosystem, but all libraries/frameworks that have a yearly major release, like to break things along the way so you're never going to hit the ground running in a couple of minutes.
renewiltord 4y ago
It doesn't look like a good match. Just walk away saying you're not interested. As a company, you'll want to prevent this sort of scenario, but as the interviewee you really don't owe them anything so you can just say you're no longer interested. If, for some reason, you feel compelled to improve their methods then you will have to succeed at their assessment in order to do so. It is a property of humans that to change a thing you have to be able to show you can handle a thing.
paxys 4y ago
Not sure what the purpose of the question is. If you don't want to do the take home test, tell the company just that. You aren't going to hurt anyone's feelings. You don't have to be overly polite about it or think of excuses. No one there is going to care. They will just move on and hire someone else. You can move on and apply somewhere else. That's all.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  Exactly, this seems like a total non-problem. "No thanks. <send>"
- jodrellblank 4y ago
  The purpose of the question is to avoid triggering "they will just move on and hire someone else". As you well know. (and evidenced by "I will also state that they can check out some of the previous code I have written on my GitHub." where the candidate still wants the company to keep considering them after declining the test.)
  - tensor 4y ago
    Whether or not you think a take home test is appropriate, it would be unethical of the company to let some candidates skip it. Every candidate should be evaluated the same way.
    - JohnFen 4y ago
      I don't really think that it would be unethical for a company to not have a uniform evaluation like that. It would be unwise, but not unethical.
    - rrobukef 4y ago
      Why would this be? The goal of the test is to have a minimal baseline. Considering outside proof of this baseline is not unethical. If maybe it shouldn't be used to rank candidates, but you'd probably do this anyway for the final consideration.
colechristensen 4y ago
Just say no. I won’t participate in interview activities that don’t involve employees spending an equal amount of time with me or paying me an hourly rate. I’m also not bothered about seeming polite when someone tells me to spend several hours of my time doing their test. The request is inconsiderate itself.
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  Exactly. If they abuse you during the hiring process, they will probably abuse you after they hire you. And yes, this is abuse. Demanding meaningless work, for free, for the chance to get hired? Because you can't figure out how to interview in a way that allows you to judge competence? Yeah, I think it's fair to call that abuse. At least exploitation.
vorpalhex 4y ago
I typically don't do "take home tests" anymore. I explain that in the past they have occupied a lot of my time and even when successful, usually things didn't work out. I point them to some of my recent foss work in return (with full git commit logs). I would probably make an exception if they offered to pay me even a token per hour (or even donate the hourly to a charity - it's about incentives not money). I have made an exception when it was literally a 20 min code challenge for a promising lead. On one hand, this does frequently stop things moving forward. On the other hand I never felt like I missed out. One company I sent them my usual polite decline and got back an angry rant from the CEO! I responded with "Well, give me your product for free for 8 hours or so and I'll give you my time for free for the same length." He did not respond after that. This is probably bad advice for very new engineers where a code sample can help differentiate you a lot, but I wish more senior+ engineers would refuse these dumb tests.
- zebraflask 4y ago
  +1 on that. The handful of times I've dumped a bunch of time and effort into an at-home screening assignment, it took far longer to do well than whatever the allotted time was made out to be. Emphasis on the "do well" part. My (unscientific) sense is that these things are really just screening for people willing to jump through unreasonable hoops.
  - kube-system 4y ago
    I feel like this is a mismatch of delivery expectations rather than a problem with take-homes. I explicitly tell our candidates that I don't expect them to put together a polished solution in the couple of hours they have for the take-home. That's fine. The point is to merely get an idea of someone's ability.
    - zebraflask 4y ago
      That's a good point. Counterpoint: what idea can be had from rushed / time-constrained / deliberately careless work examples? Any junior can copy / paste some functional yet poorly done code. Or make ChatGPT come up with something, I suppose, now that that's a thing. Experiences vary, but every job I've taken and liked - no coding tests of any kind. More of a discussion about an example piece of code, for that part of the interview, but no requirement to come up with new code.
XargonEnder 4y ago
I've never done a take-home test before meeting with the hiring manager and actually got an interview after doing the test. I've never done a test after interviewing with the hiring manager and not gotten a job offer. Therefore my rule nowadays is that I only do take home tests after meeting with the hiring manager. Oh and I should also add that I've never had a recruiter tell the truth about how long one of these should take. They always lie with some ridiculous number of hours that I know only a tiny percentage of the entire programming population could perform at.
- ape4 4y ago
  Good point, it should only occur when you're on the short list.
- inpdx 4y ago
  Which says the former are using it (and have no qualms about wasting your time) instead of actually winnowing by resume first. Smart to rule them out, they don't value your time whatsoever.
- RetpolineDrama 4y ago
  > I've never done a test after interviewing with the hiring manager and not gotten a job offer. Therefore my rule nowadays is that I only do take home tests after meeting with the hiring manager. I agree, yet there's a bunch of people in this comment section claiming you should give people take-home tests first which makes no sense to me.
water-your-self 4y ago
I vote with my labour by simply going elsewhere. Amazon requires interview candidates to show goverment ID to a webcam. I dont have a webcam and dont intend to be scrutinized in such an obtuse way. Happy to do an onsite, not happy to have to prove my citizenship to solve remote fizzbuzz.
- k4ch0w 4y ago
  I think that one is because people have their friend doing the coding interview for them. However, I understand why you’d rather keep your privacy as well.
  - TechnicolorByte 4y ago
    Seems like such a bizarre thing to be worried about. What privacy are you losing by showing your ID on a webcam to an interviewer who already has screened you?
  - justeleblanc 4y ago
    Are you applying anonymously? What privacy are we talking about, here? Put yourself in front of a blank wall if you're concerned about the interviewer gaping at your house. I don't think there's a better way to scream "I'm difficult to work with".
  - k4ch0w 4y ago
    You shared it with the employer HR, not the interviewer. Say you're an attractive person and someone now becomes obsessed with you and has your address to stalk you. That's more what I was thinking about
- moi2388 4y ago
  But fizzbuzz is so much more fun the 3rd or 5th time doing it!
Kwpolska 4y ago
This isn’t “politely decline”, it’s “tell them I failed to do it (or at least spent the suggested amount of time for the task and only got my environment setup) but still want to be considered for the job”.
hitpointdrew 4y ago
If it’s taking over 2 hours to setup the environment, then either their stack is so complex and poorly documented that it should be a red flag to bail out, or you grossly unqualified. Either way, doesn’t seem like a good fit for either side.
- karaterobot 4y ago
  Maybe. It could also be some bug, or misconfiguration, version conflict, or whatever in their interview problem repository that they haven't fixed, because no interview candidates want to admit that it took them 3 hours just to get it running. Their actual production code could be an updated version of the same code, or different code altogether. In other words, this could be a perfectly good company, but the engineers don't spend time debugging the interview process when they aren't asked to. I would agree that companies that give "2-3 hour" take home problems are a red flag for me — red as in, I won't do it anymore. That situation becomes an arms race quickly: if I can solve it in 3 hours, why not spend another 3 hours doing a second, more elegant solution that makes me look even smarter? I'm sure that's what the other candidates I'm competing with are doing. And if they're spending 6 hours, I should spend 8 hours at least, to get an edge over them. But they know I'm spending 8 hours, so they're probably spending 10...
  - hitpointdrew 4y ago
    >I would agree that companies that give "2-3 hour" take home problems are a red flag for me I wouldn't say simply having at 2-3 hour take home by itself is red flag. But if the take home is a pile of hot garbage (poorly or inadequate documentation on how to setup a local env for example) then that is red flag. My first hire (that wasn't someone I knew/previously worked with) I did not require that they complete a take home test. That hire turned out to be a complete disaster. I have since started requiring take home tests, and I will never again hire anyone that I don't know without a take home test. After requiring take home tests the candidates that have been hired have been much better.
- anaganisk 4y ago
  Why the assumptions? Not everything is a docker run. I can think of several well documented setups that can take upward of 2 hours, especially if you dont have high-speed internet or not so powerfull computer at home.
swader999 4y ago
I've seen these take home tests get gamed so bad by those who have friends on the inside. At best they have only two or three different versions.
- nerdix 4y ago
  That's going to happen regardless. Having a friend on the inside who can give you insider information is always a major advantage.
  - swader999 4y ago
    It happens with groups of friends and recruiters that send batches of applicants to the same company too though. They all share intel that's passed on. For example, there's a company that makes you do a command line battleship game, everyone knows this and they expect you to spend a day on it but many of course take a week...
kube-system 4y ago
I give similar assignments to our candidates. Most of them complete most of the assignment, and we consider that a pass. Some people struggle to get started like this, and to be honest, this is an intentional part of the assignment; they wouldn't be successful at the company. The ability to pick up something up quickly is not something everyone has.
lapcat 4y ago
In my experience, companies never bend on their in-house hiring process, so just walk away. No need to explain, unless they ask you to explain, and even then I'm not sure you ought to explain. Politely say something like "After some reflection, I've decided not to pursue the position at [company]. Thank you very much for the consideration. I wish you the best of luck."
- dylan604 4y ago
  i would leave off the last sentence. no reason to end with a lie.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    It's not necessarily a lie.
    - dylan604 4y ago
      It would be if I were to say it. I would not wish luck upon someone that behaved like this. It would mean they would have the potential for continuing this insanity on others.
      - JohnFen 4y ago
        Maybe it would be a lie if you said it, but you were saying that it's a lie if someone else says it. That's not necessarily true.
        dylan604 4y ago
        It can be read both ways
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
- waynesonfire 4y ago
BenSahar 4y ago
Just tell them you're not doing it and move on. If a company is asking you to use your free time before you're hired, that's a red flag for their expectations if you do end up being hired.
gedy 4y ago
I'll gladly do a take home vs live coding leet code. No thanks.
- nerdix 4y ago
  Exactly. I'll do the take home all day long over standing in front of a white board and hoping I'm familiar with the random programming trivial question that I'm about to be asked.
- mhitza 4y ago
  Now apply to 10+ jobs when you're unemployed, and burdened by at least 2-3 take home assignments. Sure if you're in a role and prospecting for other jobs, 1 assignment every couple of weeks/months isn't much, but if you're applying in bulk, say goodbye to your days.
  - gedy 4y ago
    I'd still prefer, as leetcode needs "prep" and studying, even if you are senior. I don't have that time free compared to a few take homes in areas I already know
latchkey 4y ago
Ask for help. Instead of spinning your wheels and wasting your time on your own. That's what I'd want an employee to do. I care less that you are having issues than I do about a complete shut down or lack of communication. Update: Already getting downvoted for this response and not even a comment to explain why... classic.
- jtr1 4y ago
  I'm genuinely surprised I had to scroll so far to see this answer, even more so by the downvotes. Especially for a junior candidate, I'd consider a pretty good sign if they were able to ask for help effectively and at the right time in their process.
  - nottathrowaway3 4y ago
    Depends if it was a standard project format like npm or setup.py. The risk is, by asking, you indicate you don't know how to use standard industry tooling. "hey, your starter code is not running in my environment, have any documentation about how to set it up" is a better question to ask when it's some custom script they hacked together.
    - JohnFen 4y ago
      > The risk is, by asking, you indicate you don't know how to use standard industry tooling. But if that's actually the problem, then it's in the best interest of both the employer and the applicant that they not be hired. The applicant isn't ready, and is likely to have a miserable time on the job.
      - nottathrowaway3 4y ago
        > then it's in the best interest of ... the applicant that they not be hired This kind of wordplay makes sense from HR's perspective. Ex: it "wouldn't be a fit for you anyway", there are "other jobs where you'll be able to grow more", etc. The best interest of the applicant is always to get an offer (or stop the interview process of their own volition). Not get rejected by a screen and get zero feedback. Obviously this costs more for the business, which is why they have incentive to use that kind of reasoning. Even if you shouldn't take it, competing offers can be used in various negotiations. And getting practice at interviewing is how you get better at interviewing (and at your actual job).
ilc 4y ago
Two branches: 1. It is near trivial for an experienced programmer in that language to do the task: You don't belong applying for this job. Example: Python. If you can't setup a python virtual env in about 30s... don't apply for a python job. 2. It is near impossible without their IDE settings. Java projects can be like this, at times. Though usually not to the tune of 3 hours, but I could see it getting there with a complex J2EE + database setup. Know which case you are in, judge accordingly. Personally: I never do take homes, unless I have a good feel for the company. If the take home is given by HR. Welcome to my circular file. This is a hard and fast rule at this point. If the hiring manager wants me to do it... That's different. But I want to talk to them and decide if this is worth my time first.
- Jemaclus 4y ago
  Ironically, the hiring managers wants you to take the test so they can decide if you're worth their time first. It's quite a pickle.
  - mooreds 4y ago
    > It's quite a pickle. The old game of chicken: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_(game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_(game) As usual, the party with the best alternatives wins.
  - roflyear 4y ago
    It's sad because it costs nothing to ask someone to do a take home and it costs a lot in aggregate for people to do them.
    - AtlasBarfed 4y ago
      It costs you the best people not taking the job.
      - roflyear 4y ago
        Well, yes lol
lazzlazzlazz 4y ago
I won't hire someone unless they do the task. If they don't want to do it, or don't have time, we can just talk about it. It's not that hard.
- telmo 4y ago
  If enough people refuse to jump thought the hoops, you will hire someone without them doing the task.
  - lazzlazzlazz 4y ago
    Sure, and then you'd have to fire more people that don't work out. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Seems net worse for everyone.
liuliu 4y ago
(Talking about several-hour long take-homes, not FizzBuzz problems). It is cruel, but it is numbers game. The take-home is easier for hiring managers given the macro environment and would help to cull out false positives (hence "numbers game"). Our industry has way passed the point of not playing these numbers game. The most friendly ones I've seen is a "take-home" done onsite with generous time given, and an engineer can answer questions. It helps to simulate work environment as much as possible. The upfront cost is extreme for the companies though: you put up your engineers time for these onsites. You did end up with good hires, but the time limit is real (v.s. take-home), and that shoot up your false negatives through the roof. But it does respect candidate's time, and friendly. For companies can afford (in the sense that good candidates just walk away), "take-home" portion also helps "alignment". If you spend extra time on it and really want to get in, you are probably ideal (or desperate, but still ideal, gives the company more leverage). These are given no cheating is happening though. I have to admit that I never did good on these "take-home" tests. Setting up environment normally was not an issue, just without an engineer to clarify constraints, I often end up with less-than-commonly-expected solutions and make the interviewer hard to judge the end-result (most "take-home" from interviewers' perspective are very structured like exams, you get x points here, y points there, if you go off the expected path, it was hard to score these points). ChatGPT probably will do a better job than me at this these days though.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  One of my most enjoyable past interviewing experiences was doing a take-home for some game company (probably Accolade). They shipped it as a zip file (late 90s), and there was a clear "todo" function. The task was to navigate an airplane across the map from a starting square to a destination square while avoiding mountain squares. The airplane always moved ahead 1 square each move and you could tell it to turn left 45°, stay straight, or turn right 45°. If you compiled it without writing the function, the airplane just flew straight. Perfectly reasonable task, IMO; it's even relevant to the gaming domain; you could do a simple version in an hour; I spent about 2 hours as I wrote a test harness and let it run overnight keeping score of how many maps it succeeded on and how many it failed on. The interviewer used my submission in the on-site as well to ask a few questions about it. Your numbers game comment is spot-on. From the employers' end, the hiring market problem looks like: There's high pay for software engineering roles. There's no effective credential mechanism. (I think this good, but it's not helping employers here.) Because of the combination of the first two, lots of people are motivated to try to land a job. Because of that, lots of people who aren't really qualified enter the pipeline. Because they're not really qualified, they keep applying over and over, while the qualified eventually get hired. Because of that, the applicant pool has a massive adverse selection problem (the average applicant is *much worse* than the median employee) and companies have to find a way to filter out the worst-of-the-worst before applying significant manual effort.
pydry 4y ago
Not really sure why any company would set a take home test these days. It not only sends a signal that your time as a candidate is worth less than the company's, it makes it easier to game (e.g. use ChatGPT).
MontyCarloHall 4y ago
Take home coding tests as a 0th round interview step can be extremely effective if they are short (30m-1h), relatively easy pulse checks (a step or two above FizzBuzz level). Any more involved than that and they are insulting to candidates, thus driving away talent. I worked for a company that administered a simple half-hour take home coding challenge before any interviews. The problem was simple but not trivial — print Fibonacci numbers, take a string of brackets and print if they were properly nested (e.g. '()(())' is OK, '(()(' is not). We had essentially zero attrition of candidates with good CVs who refused to take the test. On the other hand, we disqualified >80% of applicants from the test alone, saving an enormous amount of interviewer time. It would have sucked to have phone screened all those candidates and spent half an hour of company time on each one to discover they can't code at all.
- yellowcake0 4y ago
  It sounds like it is working for that company so more power to them I suppose, and I've certainly done my fair share of coding tests and take home assignments, however I consider it personally disrespectful to automate the initial interview round in this way. If you're asking me to put in work, even if it's an ostensibly short task, I want to talk to someone first.
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    Well, ok, everybody sees things their own way. Personally, I would be glad to do a short take home if it's clear that it will reduce the bullshit analysis of curriculum. I'd be even happier if it replaced a whiteboard FizzBuzz, and would raise good flags if it was a mathy problem like the ones the OP talked about, instead of unmotivated terminal or memory juggling.
  - kube-system 4y ago
    I agree, it's disrespectful. I always give people the opportunity to speak with a human about the job before requiring they invest any time on an assignment. Seeing if someone has the skills to do the job is secondary to determining if the job is a fit in plain-english conversation.
pfoof 4y ago
Ask for a Docker/VM image, some build script like Gradle or Makefile and .editorconfig. Without that, the actual job might be just as frustrating
pauljonas 4y ago
This is a thing now when applying for developer jobs. When I was looking for a job in 2020-2021, I think it happened everywhere I got past the original opening interview round. Sometimes the task was trivial or even submitting code samples (which can be problematic if the relevant examples were done for a previous proprietary interest that would not be agreeable to share this code). Other cases were more elaborate, requiring a half-day of work or more. In one instance, I had an assignment for a front end JS / UX page, completed the assignment then heard back from the prospective employer that according to their review of my "homework" submission, I was overqualified for the position. I mean, you can say "no", but then in all probability the prospective employer is going to proceed to the next candidate.
twawaaay 4y ago
I don't give take-home test tasks. I believe this is a waste of time for the company because it gives pretty much no useful information. A well written solution says nothing -- it could even potentially have been outsourced to somebody else. It also causes the candidate to waste as much time as possible because the candidate will feel pressed to spend every bit of time to further polish the solution. I think if I was to refuse take-home task this would be the exact official reason: Because I believe take-home tasks are unfair and incentivise candidates to waste as much time as possible for no benefit for the company. Instead, I do pair programming session debugging a piece of code and unit tests. It is not about the solution, it is about getting to know the candidate as he/she is working on a task.
photochemsyn 4y ago
This response in the comments: > "The test was as much about seeing if the if the candidate could deal with manually setting up the build environment without assistance as much as it was about the coding problem itself. If the candidate couldn't get the tools installed on his own or felt insulted it wasn't his ideal IDE, then they figured the candidate would not do well as an embedded engineer on more complicated boards with even worse tool chains." In general however a take-home test voids the primary rationale for the real-time on-site coding interview, which is that it's very easy these days to complete such tests without knowing much about the material via various routes, as academic CS programs continue to demonstrate. It's also true that academic CS programs tend to be terrible when it comes to learning about tools, toolchains, build systems, virtual environments, etc. There are some efforts to change this at least: https://missing.csail.mit.edu/ https://missing.csail.mit.edu/ Even that's not that comprehensive. Searching "introduction to toolchains and complex build systems" reveals how difficult the issue is. It's the kind of thing that should probably be included in the job description.
- kube-system 4y ago
  Yes, I find that students straight out of school understand the concepts of coding, but have trouble applying their knowledge. Knowing how to write a function in Python is one thing, but if you can't install it on a computer and use it to solve a problem, you're not going to be productive unless we have other employees who will do those things for you. And some organizations do. Particularly the large organizations that hire lots of students straight out of school.
wootland 4y ago
Giving people take home tests or leet code challenges is a backwards hiring process. Why as a manager are you wasting your time and the candidate's time "discovering" if they can code when there's millions of developers who are actively working in the open on OSS platforms like GitHub? I don't give tests, I don't give technical interviews. I scout amazing developers and try to convince them to join my team. Not only do you get top notch people like that (who very much appreciate not being "tested"), you also save a ton of time. Your job as a manager is to proactively search for the best people possible to join your team, hire them and keep them as happy as humanly possible.
- matthewmacleod 4y ago
  You will certainly be able to find excellent developers that way. You'll also automatically rule out the vast majority of amazing developers that aren't "actively working in the open on OSS platforms".
  - wootland 4y ago
    If I can quickly hire as many amazing candidates as needed using this method, then I don't really have a need to try to find the needle in the haystack that are the great devs in the global community of all devs using technical interviews. That's a very wasteful process.
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  > Why as a manager are you wasting your time and the candidate's time "discovering" if they can code when there's millions of developers who are actively working in the open on OSS platforms like GitHub? The number of developers who have something recent and meaningful on GitHub is extremely small. I’ve interviewed and hired a lot of great developers. Very few of them had much of anything on GitHub. Often the most I could find were one-line patches to projects somewhere. If you limit your hiring to GitHub OSS superstars, you’re going to miss out on a massive number of excellent developers.
  - wootland 4y ago
DeathArrow 4y ago
When I interviewed for my current position, I had a home assignment to solve. They said 2-3 hours which transformed in 2-3 days over the weekend for me. I really wanted to do a good job, so I thought it thoroughly, did it and modified it until the result was the best I could do. Even without taking my time to do the best job possible, it wasn't going to be a 2 hours job, but at least a 4 or 5 hours job. It will never going to last as they say. For one reason, persons giving these tests are underestimating the time. And if I said that I don't want the test, they wouldn't have hired me, which would be a shame. :) At other interviews when I got to choose between live coding or sessions with questions and home assignments, I've always have chosen home assignments and always got an offer.
- apwheele 4y ago
  Being a former professor, to do good tests is really hard. The vast majority of take home tests are quite poor that I have seen (in data science at least). I am skeptical most people even attempt to do their own tests they create, I commonly see people suggest things will be 2-4 hours when they will be a day or two of work, https://www.bryanshalloway.com/2020/10/27/should-you-use-an-assignment-or-exercise-as-part-of-your-hiring-process-for-a-data-scientist/ https://www.bryanshalloway.com/2020/10/27/should-you-use-an-....
  - siva7 4y ago
    I know of some management colleagues who are fast at compiling interview tasks but i know they never did their tasks themselves and you could tell just how bad these tasks were.
- dilyevsky 4y ago
  The reason is simple - nobody there has done it or if they did lied about how much it took
Mizoguchi 4y ago
I don't think being (reasonably) late matters much as long as you do a good job. Try giving a bit more than asked and explain your thought process clearly. If you can't come up with a full solution at least mention what you would like to try if you had more time. ALWAYS write in a positive tone, try avoiding words like "can't" and "difficult". Provide a short summary about what you learned with the test. I got offers this way despite being late for several hours or even days.
cm2012 4y ago
Work sample tests and IQ are the only thing in the whole hiring song and dance that correlate to future performance. And it's legally questionable to test IQ.
dcow 4y ago
What is the difference between a take home test that takes 4 hours and a company asking you to take a day off to come interview with 5 different people, other than one being less of a time commitment than the other? In a remote first, or at least remote friendly, world, take home tests seem inevitable.
- dilyevsky 4y ago
  The difference is all the cost is beared by the candidate
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  Skin in the game. If I take a day off and come in for an interview, it's going to take them a day of their time, too. They're not going to waste my time, because it's their time, too. But for a take home, it costs my time, but not theirs. They have little incentive to be considerate of my time, because they don't feel the pain.
di456 4y ago
An alternative is to give the candidate a choice of a live coding exercise or a take home project. Some people work better one way or the other. It sets them up for success rather than making a take home project an arbitrary filter. And I hope the same take home project is used for every candidate and it's not a scam to get work done for free.
thrwy_918 4y ago
I would imagine that most employers have no idea how long their take-home tests actually take, because there is a strong incentive for interviewees to lie about how long they spent on the test, and almost no incentive to be honest. Yes, you can have your own engineers estimate how long it should take, but those engineers i) are already familiar with your problem domain and tooling, assuming the take-home test is reflective of those, ii) estimating is hard, even for small tasks, and iii) also don't have any incentive to name a high number vs. a low number, because a low number will make them look more competent I have completed many take-home tests for jobs I wanted, and I don't think I have ever been honest about how long such a test took.
- siva7 4y ago
  Yep, the question "How long did you take for the test" is so universally useless that i'm left wondering how so many management colleagues are that clueless to take the answers at face value. It's also oftentimes that people don't bother to do the very own tasks they themselves designed.
danwee 4y ago
Take-home tests are the worst. This is why: - it doesn't value equally candidate's time and company's time. The candidate has to spend hours/days to do the test, while the company evaluates the result in minutes (1h at most) - they are always open-ended, so you can always do more... that means the more hours you put on it the higher the chance of passing. So, if I spend 4h, but you spend 10h, all things equal, you got the job - if they are underspecified and you dare to ask questions... be ready for a huge email-thread coming and long waiting times (in the order of hours instead of in the order of seconds/minutes as it would be the case if you were doing the test "online" with them) - if you ask questions: how many questions is good enough? Maybe I'm asking too many? Or too few? I cannot really tell by the way they write their email answers to me (I could tell if I were asking the questions in a video-call, though... but damn it, this is a home-take test!)
- kube-system 4y ago
  Companies that do take homes that way are bad. They don't have to be done that way. They should be limited in duration intentionally to respect people's time and to keep things fair between candidates.
  - danwee 4y ago
    That doesn't work either. If I send you a take-home test and I set the duration of it to be 3 days: what if you (think) you are done in 4 hours? Will you just send it? Or will you spend more time on it because, well, maybe other people are spending the actual 24*3 hours on that take-home test? Maybe they add documenation that can be viewed directly in the command line? Maybe they add a better (bigger) set of test cases? Maybe they even go further the specs of the problem and hand over an actual reusable piece of library (which you didn't because based on your judgment, the task could have been done in 4 hours easily, without the need to write a library out of it, and so that's what you did rightly). Take-home tasks are the wrong solution to this difficult problem of our that is hiring.
    - kube-system 4y ago
      All of those durations are way too long. 2 or 3 hours is pushing it. That is plenty enough time to determine whether a candidate can write code.
aintgonnatakeit 4y ago
How are these relevant in the age of LLMs? Prompt hack a little, run the exercise through it, edit some things, done.
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
When I read the title, I thought this was going to be a story about one of those ridiculous take-home tests that requires multiple days of work to complete. Reading the post (and some of the crucial follow up comments), it appears the author spent 2 hours with the environment they provided and gave up: > Currently, I'm about 2 and a half hours in, trying to get my virtual environment to run the baseline code they provided. Reading between the lines (and from the comments/follow ups) I think the take-home challenge might be working as designed: Filtering out candidates who are not yet experienced enough to handle the type of work the company does. The author’s desire to substitute some of their own, different, code samples as evidence of qualification is likely missing the point: Quickly getting the code to run in the provided environment was part of the challenge. We had a similar problem at a past company where we cast too broad of a net for candidates: When we did no-prep trials of the take-home challenge among team members who hadn’t seen it yet, completion times were all under one hour. When we gave it to loosely-screened candidates, we got several complaints from people who said they were on hour 8 and still couldn’t make a lot of progress. Tightening up our pre-screening mostly fixed that problem. It’s not good to waste candidate’s time if they’re not going to be qualified.
- kamaal 4y ago
  >>I thought this was going to be a story about one of those ridiculous take-home tests that requires multiple days of work to complete. Every single take home test I have ever taken. It took multiple days to finish. And even after finishing it, you still don't get the job. In one place I not only finished the test. Their onsite interview was made up of four more rounds. The first two were about implementing two features on the spot where two of their engineers watched as I wrote the code. And then in the third round they review your code. All onsite. I not only finished the original assignment, added the two features requested and substantiated every single query on code they had in the code review round. Yet in the last round, they rejected me because I didn't read their employee's favorite paper. And therefore must be a bad programmer. And this is the one of the most famous company in Bangalore which routinely brags about hiring programmers only on the basis of take home tests. The whole take home test thing is a giant fraud. Don't fall for it. They are not serious about hiring you. Serious people know whom to hire after an hour or two of discussions. Also contrary to whatever people think about the archetype inefficient programmer who fails at fizzbuzz, most people can actually code. This whole take home test thing is a marketing campaign and generally a way for in house programmers to make themselves feel superior by routinely asking candidates to finish projects in impossible timelines and yet reject them like they are gods.
JJMcJ 4y ago
Elaborate setup: maybe some candidates will already have it. If it requires a gig of downloads, and a bunch of configuration files, it's over the top. Also, does it have business value? If so, it gets more suspicious.
rongenre 4y ago
A perspective: I've had two jobs which started with take-home tests. Honestly, I found them fun - they were maybe on the level of a 2nd or 3rd year undergrad CS homework assignment. The jobs also were the ones I stayed around for the longest.
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loxias 4y ago
Not sure what's going on here, the premise of the post ticks me off. How to politely decline a take-home test is to decline it. Unsure how anyone who can't do take home tests is qualified to do the underlying work. Make room for those of us who THRIVE on take home tests and struggle at whiteboard interviews, I'll be happy to take that job.
JustSomeNobody 4y ago
Setting up the VE was probably part of the "test" and if you took all your time (and failed) setting it up, you failed the take home. You should have asked questions if you were having issues. Generally [0], people want to hire good candidates, not shit on people who aren't yet ready. Asking questions doesn't mean you're not ready. Not asking means you definitely are not ready. [0] Yes, there are some assholes out there that love to torture candidates. Seriously.
dordoka 4y ago
Just say "No, thank you" and move on to the next opportunity.
world2vec 4y ago
Do doctors, lawyers, civil engineers, etc, also do take-home tests? Honest question, I don't know how other knowledge workers get hired. I know fashion designers (like my gf) do have really long and demanding take-home tests and then at the end they don't pass to the next stage... Weeks of late nights and no weekends for nothing, repeat several times.
peoplearepeople 4y ago
It's just a "No thanks, bye."
olliej 4y ago
I still don’t understand the purpose of take home tests. They’re either substantial enough that it should be paid, which puts the candidate in a difficult position given that they already have a job. Moreover if you see anything interesting in their solution, it likely belongs to their current employer so whatever they wrote is tainted, and anyone who reads it and then does something similar may also be tainted. If it’s not substantial enough to be interesting you can just stick to standard interviews which also mitigates the risk of cheating.
pengaru 4y ago
Reading the comments here has me horrified... At what point did programming exercises during interviews for programming roles become anything more than a litmus test to weed out fraudsters early in the process? It's not supposed to be an unpaid hazing ritual, don't turn it into one. We're talking about technical engineering positions here folks. Once you've filtered out the frauds have a technical deep-dive conversation with the person that is germane to the role and their CV. You need to vet their communication and collaboration abilities and fit anyways. A take-home exercise doesn't produce any of that information. It's _deep_ in diminishing returns land vs. having them spit out a toy program from blank slate -> executable in a few minutes. If they struggle with that, you likely have a fraud, end the process, NEXT. There's a reason a month would pass before benefits kick in; it's enough time to see if they can do the actual job and get along with everyone.
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noisy_boy 4y ago
In one of the recent interviews, they told that I needed to do a 4-hour coding assignment (in one sitting) to implement an order matching system. I appreciated telling me that upfront so I that I could simply say I am not interested in proceeding with the role. Wasn't difficult at all for both parties.

xwdv 4y ago

My advice: if you take 3 hours just to set up a virtual environment for our take home test, save yourself the embarrassment and cancel your interview.

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vorpalhex 4y ago
Before I started refusing these, I did one that was an integration with the companies sdk. The sdk was broken! So I produced a minimum viable repro, wrote up a bug report and even included an analysis of where the bug was. The company had the gall to still ask me to do a take home using the patched sdk! If your take home test is broken, stupid or not trivial to setup, it's not the applicant who is at fault.
- pydry 4y ago
  That's amazing. It's like a red flag made out of red flags.
- swader999 4y ago
  The hiring process works both ways. In this case they failed and you're time spent prevented a lot of future grief.
  - swader999 4y ago
    OMG your.
- Kwpolska 4y ago
  While there exist companies that overdo it and expect weird things like that, I believe the majority of companies expect something simple — if you’re applying to be a <rolls dice> Rails backend developer, you would probably be asked to build some simple API with a couple endpoints. And if you are applying for that position, you should know how to set up Ruby (and you should probably have it installed on your laptop, even if you aren’t doing much coding outside of work/for fun/in open-source projects), install Rails, create an app, and write the simple endpoints. The OOP seems to be struggling with something like that (and “virtual environment” smells very Pythony to me — even though Python packaging is a trainwreck, someone applying for a Python job shouldn’t need 3+ hours to set things up for a simple project.)
- sokoloff 4y ago
  Sending a valid, minimal reproduction case in the highest possible score on the take-home in my book. The take home is designed to efficiently weed out the hopelessly unqualified (of which the applicant pool is unsurprisingly over-represented). You clearly passed that test and, by asking a second time, the company saved you a bunch of further wasted time.
swader999 4y ago
That's not really fair, a lot of good devs just don't work with vms, downloading all the bits could take up half of that time.
mhitza 4y ago
I'll give you a counter example. I've worked extensively with the symfony framework (10+ years at this point), and clearly remember a company I've applied to a couple of years back guesstimating that the take home assignment is going to take 2-3 hours tops to complete. And the requirements might be reasonable for an already setup project, but when you have to do it from zero; unless you're scaffolding new symfony projects every time a new release is out, you're going to waste at least an hour scaffolding/googling/installing/wiring up all the dependencies/auth/orm you might need for you flow. It's not as bad as within the NodeJS ecosystem, but all libraries/frameworks that have a yearly major release, like to break things along the way so you're never going to hit the ground running in a couple of minutes.

renewiltord 4y ago

It doesn't look like a good match. Just walk away saying you're not interested. As a company, you'll want to prevent this sort of scenario, but as the interviewee you really don't owe them anything so you can just say you're no longer interested. If, for some reason, you feel compelled to improve their methods then you will have to succeed at their assessment in order to do so. It is a property of humans that to change a thing you have to be able to show you can handle a thing.

paxys 4y ago

Not sure what the purpose of the question is. If you don't want to do the take home test, tell the company just that. You aren't going to hurt anyone's feelings. You don't have to be overly polite about it or think of excuses. No one there is going to care. They will just move on and hire someone else. You can move on and apply somewhere else. That's all.

sokoloff 4y ago
Exactly, this seems like a total non-problem. "No thanks. <send>"
jodrellblank 4y ago
The purpose of the question is to avoid triggering "they will just move on and hire someone else". As you well know. (and evidenced by "I will also state that they can check out some of the previous code I have written on my GitHub." where the candidate still wants the company to keep considering them after declining the test.)
- tensor 4y ago
  Whether or not you think a take home test is appropriate, it would be unethical of the company to let some candidates skip it. Every candidate should be evaluated the same way.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    I don't really think that it would be unethical for a company to not have a uniform evaluation like that. It would be unwise, but not unethical.
  - rrobukef 4y ago
    Why would this be? The goal of the test is to have a minimal baseline. Considering outside proof of this baseline is not unethical. If maybe it shouldn't be used to rank candidates, but you'd probably do this anyway for the final consideration.

colechristensen 4y ago

Just say no. I won’t participate in interview activities that don’t involve employees spending an equal amount of time with me or paying me an hourly rate. I’m also not bothered about seeming polite when someone tells me to spend several hours of my time doing their test. The request is inconsiderate itself.

AnimalMuppet 4y ago
Exactly. If they abuse you during the hiring process, they will probably abuse you after they hire you. And yes, this is abuse. Demanding meaningless work, for free, for the chance to get hired? Because you can't figure out how to interview in a way that allows you to judge competence? Yeah, I think it's fair to call that abuse. At least exploitation.

vorpalhex 4y ago

I typically don't do "take home tests" anymore. I explain that in the past they have occupied a lot of my time and even when successful, usually things didn't work out. I point them to some of my recent foss work in return (with full git commit logs). I would probably make an exception if they offered to pay me even a token per hour (or even donate the hourly to a charity - it's about incentives not money). I have made an exception when it was literally a 20 min code challenge for a promising lead. On one hand, this does frequently stop things moving forward. On the other hand I never felt like I missed out. One company I sent them my usual polite decline and got back an angry rant from the CEO! I responded with "Well, give me your product for free for 8 hours or so and I'll give you my time for free for the same length." He did not respond after that. This is probably bad advice for very new engineers where a code sample can help differentiate you a lot, but I wish more senior+ engineers would refuse these dumb tests.

zebraflask 4y ago
+1 on that. The handful of times I've dumped a bunch of time and effort into an at-home screening assignment, it took far longer to do well than whatever the allotted time was made out to be. Emphasis on the "do well" part. My (unscientific) sense is that these things are really just screening for people willing to jump through unreasonable hoops.
- kube-system 4y ago
  I feel like this is a mismatch of delivery expectations rather than a problem with take-homes. I explicitly tell our candidates that I don't expect them to put together a polished solution in the couple of hours they have for the take-home. That's fine. The point is to merely get an idea of someone's ability.
  - zebraflask 4y ago
    That's a good point. Counterpoint: what idea can be had from rushed / time-constrained / deliberately careless work examples? Any junior can copy / paste some functional yet poorly done code. Or make ChatGPT come up with something, I suppose, now that that's a thing. Experiences vary, but every job I've taken and liked - no coding tests of any kind. More of a discussion about an example piece of code, for that part of the interview, but no requirement to come up with new code.

XargonEnder 4y ago

I've never done a take-home test before meeting with the hiring manager and actually got an interview after doing the test. I've never done a test after interviewing with the hiring manager and not gotten a job offer. Therefore my rule nowadays is that I only do take home tests after meeting with the hiring manager. Oh and I should also add that I've never had a recruiter tell the truth about how long one of these should take. They always lie with some ridiculous number of hours that I know only a tiny percentage of the entire programming population could perform at.

ape4 4y ago
Good point, it should only occur when you're on the short list.
inpdx 4y ago
Which says the former are using it (and have no qualms about wasting your time) instead of actually winnowing by resume first. Smart to rule them out, they don't value your time whatsoever.
RetpolineDrama 4y ago
> I've never done a test after interviewing with the hiring manager and not gotten a job offer. Therefore my rule nowadays is that I only do take home tests after meeting with the hiring manager. I agree, yet there's a bunch of people in this comment section claiming you should give people take-home tests first which makes no sense to me.

water-your-self 4y ago

I vote with my labour by simply going elsewhere. Amazon requires interview candidates to show goverment ID to a webcam. I dont have a webcam and dont intend to be scrutinized in such an obtuse way. Happy to do an onsite, not happy to have to prove my citizenship to solve remote fizzbuzz.

k4ch0w 4y ago
I think that one is because people have their friend doing the coding interview for them. However, I understand why you’d rather keep your privacy as well.
- TechnicolorByte 4y ago
  Seems like such a bizarre thing to be worried about. What privacy are you losing by showing your ID on a webcam to an interviewer who already has screened you?
- justeleblanc 4y ago
  Are you applying anonymously? What privacy are we talking about, here? Put yourself in front of a blank wall if you're concerned about the interviewer gaping at your house. I don't think there's a better way to scream "I'm difficult to work with".
- k4ch0w 4y ago
  You shared it with the employer HR, not the interviewer. Say you're an attractive person and someone now becomes obsessed with you and has your address to stalk you. That's more what I was thinking about
moi2388 4y ago
But fizzbuzz is so much more fun the 3rd or 5th time doing it!

Kwpolska 4y ago

This isn’t “politely decline”, it’s “tell them I failed to do it (or at least spent the suggested amount of time for the task and only got my environment setup) but still want to be considered for the job”.

hitpointdrew 4y ago

If it’s taking over 2 hours to setup the environment, then either their stack is so complex and poorly documented that it should be a red flag to bail out, or you grossly unqualified. Either way, doesn’t seem like a good fit for either side.

karaterobot 4y ago
Maybe. It could also be some bug, or misconfiguration, version conflict, or whatever in their interview problem repository that they haven't fixed, because no interview candidates want to admit that it took them 3 hours just to get it running. Their actual production code could be an updated version of the same code, or different code altogether. In other words, this could be a perfectly good company, but the engineers don't spend time debugging the interview process when they aren't asked to. I would agree that companies that give "2-3 hour" take home problems are a red flag for me — red as in, I won't do it anymore. That situation becomes an arms race quickly: if I can solve it in 3 hours, why not spend another 3 hours doing a second, more elegant solution that makes me look even smarter? I'm sure that's what the other candidates I'm competing with are doing. And if they're spending 6 hours, I should spend 8 hours at least, to get an edge over them. But they know I'm spending 8 hours, so they're probably spending 10...
- hitpointdrew 4y ago
  >I would agree that companies that give "2-3 hour" take home problems are a red flag for me I wouldn't say simply having at 2-3 hour take home by itself is red flag. But if the take home is a pile of hot garbage (poorly or inadequate documentation on how to setup a local env for example) then that is red flag. My first hire (that wasn't someone I knew/previously worked with) I did not require that they complete a take home test. That hire turned out to be a complete disaster. I have since started requiring take home tests, and I will never again hire anyone that I don't know without a take home test. After requiring take home tests the candidates that have been hired have been much better.
anaganisk 4y ago
Why the assumptions? Not everything is a docker run. I can think of several well documented setups that can take upward of 2 hours, especially if you dont have high-speed internet or not so powerfull computer at home.

swader999 4y ago

I've seen these take home tests get gamed so bad by those who have friends on the inside. At best they have only two or three different versions.

nerdix 4y ago
That's going to happen regardless. Having a friend on the inside who can give you insider information is always a major advantage.
- swader999 4y ago
  It happens with groups of friends and recruiters that send batches of applicants to the same company too though. They all share intel that's passed on. For example, there's a company that makes you do a command line battleship game, everyone knows this and they expect you to spend a day on it but many of course take a week...

kube-system 4y ago

I give similar assignments to our candidates. Most of them complete most of the assignment, and we consider that a pass. Some people struggle to get started like this, and to be honest, this is an intentional part of the assignment; they wouldn't be successful at the company. The ability to pick up something up quickly is not something everyone has.

lapcat 4y ago

In my experience, companies never bend on their in-house hiring process, so just walk away. No need to explain, unless they ask you to explain, and even then I'm not sure you ought to explain. Politely say something like "After some reflection, I've decided not to pursue the position at [company]. Thank you very much for the consideration. I wish you the best of luck."

dylan604 4y ago
i would leave off the last sentence. no reason to end with a lie.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  It's not necessarily a lie.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    It would be if I were to say it. I would not wish luck upon someone that behaved like this. It would mean they would have the potential for continuing this insanity on others.
    - JohnFen 4y ago
      Maybe it would be a lie if you said it, but you were saying that it's a lie if someone else says it. That's not necessarily true.
      - dylan604 4y ago
        It can be read both ways
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waynesonfire 4y ago

BenSahar 4y ago

Just tell them you're not doing it and move on. If a company is asking you to use your free time before you're hired, that's a red flag for their expectations if you do end up being hired.

gedy 4y ago

I'll gladly do a take home vs live coding leet code. No thanks.

nerdix 4y ago
Exactly. I'll do the take home all day long over standing in front of a white board and hoping I'm familiar with the random programming trivial question that I'm about to be asked.
mhitza 4y ago
Now apply to 10+ jobs when you're unemployed, and burdened by at least 2-3 take home assignments. Sure if you're in a role and prospecting for other jobs, 1 assignment every couple of weeks/months isn't much, but if you're applying in bulk, say goodbye to your days.
- gedy 4y ago
  I'd still prefer, as leetcode needs "prep" and studying, even if you are senior. I don't have that time free compared to a few take homes in areas I already know

latchkey 4y ago

Ask for help. Instead of spinning your wheels and wasting your time on your own. That's what I'd want an employee to do. I care less that you are having issues than I do about a complete shut down or lack of communication. Update: Already getting downvoted for this response and not even a comment to explain why... classic.

jtr1 4y ago
I'm genuinely surprised I had to scroll so far to see this answer, even more so by the downvotes. Especially for a junior candidate, I'd consider a pretty good sign if they were able to ask for help effectively and at the right time in their process.
- nottathrowaway3 4y ago
  Depends if it was a standard project format like npm or setup.py. The risk is, by asking, you indicate you don't know how to use standard industry tooling. "hey, your starter code is not running in my environment, have any documentation about how to set it up" is a better question to ask when it's some custom script they hacked together.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    > The risk is, by asking, you indicate you don't know how to use standard industry tooling. But if that's actually the problem, then it's in the best interest of both the employer and the applicant that they not be hired. The applicant isn't ready, and is likely to have a miserable time on the job.
    - nottathrowaway3 4y ago
      > then it's in the best interest of ... the applicant that they not be hired This kind of wordplay makes sense from HR's perspective. Ex: it "wouldn't be a fit for you anyway", there are "other jobs where you'll be able to grow more", etc. The best interest of the applicant is always to get an offer (or stop the interview process of their own volition). Not get rejected by a screen and get zero feedback. Obviously this costs more for the business, which is why they have incentive to use that kind of reasoning. Even if you shouldn't take it, competing offers can be used in various negotiations. And getting practice at interviewing is how you get better at interviewing (and at your actual job).

ilc 4y ago

Two branches: 1. It is near trivial for an experienced programmer in that language to do the task: You don't belong applying for this job. Example: Python. If you can't setup a python virtual env in about 30s... don't apply for a python job. 2. It is near impossible without their IDE settings. Java projects can be like this, at times. Though usually not to the tune of 3 hours, but I could see it getting there with a complex J2EE + database setup. Know which case you are in, judge accordingly. Personally: I never do take homes, unless I have a good feel for the company. If the take home is given by HR. Welcome to my circular file. This is a hard and fast rule at this point. If the hiring manager wants me to do it... That's different. But I want to talk to them and decide if this is worth my time first.

Jemaclus 4y ago
Ironically, the hiring managers wants you to take the test so they can decide if you're worth their time first. It's quite a pickle.
- mooreds 4y ago
  > It's quite a pickle. The old game of chicken: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_(game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_(game) As usual, the party with the best alternatives wins.
- roflyear 4y ago
  It's sad because it costs nothing to ask someone to do a take home and it costs a lot in aggregate for people to do them.
  - AtlasBarfed 4y ago
    It costs you the best people not taking the job.
    - roflyear 4y ago
      Well, yes lol

lazzlazzlazz 4y ago

I won't hire someone unless they do the task. If they don't want to do it, or don't have time, we can just talk about it. It's not that hard.

telmo 4y ago
If enough people refuse to jump thought the hoops, you will hire someone without them doing the task.
- lazzlazzlazz 4y ago
  Sure, and then you'd have to fire more people that don't work out. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Seems net worse for everyone.

liuliu 4y ago

(Talking about several-hour long take-homes, not FizzBuzz problems). It is cruel, but it is numbers game. The take-home is easier for hiring managers given the macro environment and would help to cull out false positives (hence "numbers game"). Our industry has way passed the point of not playing these numbers game. The most friendly ones I've seen is a "take-home" done onsite with generous time given, and an engineer can answer questions. It helps to simulate work environment as much as possible. The upfront cost is extreme for the companies though: you put up your engineers time for these onsites. You did end up with good hires, but the time limit is real (v.s. take-home), and that shoot up your false negatives through the roof. But it does respect candidate's time, and friendly. For companies can afford (in the sense that good candidates just walk away), "take-home" portion also helps "alignment". If you spend extra time on it and really want to get in, you are probably ideal (or desperate, but still ideal, gives the company more leverage). These are given no cheating is happening though. I have to admit that I never did good on these "take-home" tests. Setting up environment normally was not an issue, just without an engineer to clarify constraints, I often end up with less-than-commonly-expected solutions and make the interviewer hard to judge the end-result (most "take-home" from interviewers' perspective are very structured like exams, you get x points here, y points there, if you go off the expected path, it was hard to score these points). ChatGPT probably will do a better job than me at this these days though.

sokoloff 4y ago
One of my most enjoyable past interviewing experiences was doing a take-home for some game company (probably Accolade). They shipped it as a zip file (late 90s), and there was a clear "todo" function. The task was to navigate an airplane across the map from a starting square to a destination square while avoiding mountain squares. The airplane always moved ahead 1 square each move and you could tell it to turn left 45°, stay straight, or turn right 45°. If you compiled it without writing the function, the airplane just flew straight. Perfectly reasonable task, IMO; it's even relevant to the gaming domain; you could do a simple version in an hour; I spent about 2 hours as I wrote a test harness and let it run overnight keeping score of how many maps it succeeded on and how many it failed on. The interviewer used my submission in the on-site as well to ask a few questions about it. Your numbers game comment is spot-on. From the employers' end, the hiring market problem looks like: There's high pay for software engineering roles. There's no effective credential mechanism. (I think this good, but it's not helping employers here.) Because of the combination of the first two, lots of people are motivated to try to land a job. Because of that, lots of people who aren't really qualified enter the pipeline. Because they're not really qualified, they keep applying over and over, while the qualified eventually get hired. Because of that, the applicant pool has a massive adverse selection problem (the average applicant is *much worse* than the median employee) and companies have to find a way to filter out the worst-of-the-worst before applying significant manual effort.

pydry 4y ago

Not really sure why any company would set a take home test these days. It not only sends a signal that your time as a candidate is worth less than the company's, it makes it easier to game (e.g. use ChatGPT).

MontyCarloHall 4y ago

Take home coding tests as a 0th round interview step can be extremely effective if they are short (30m-1h), relatively easy pulse checks (a step or two above FizzBuzz level). Any more involved than that and they are insulting to candidates, thus driving away talent. I worked for a company that administered a simple half-hour take home coding challenge before any interviews. The problem was simple but not trivial — print Fibonacci numbers, take a string of brackets and print if they were properly nested (e.g. '()(())' is OK, '(()(' is not). We had essentially zero attrition of candidates with good CVs who refused to take the test. On the other hand, we disqualified >80% of applicants from the test alone, saving an enormous amount of interviewer time. It would have sucked to have phone screened all those candidates and spent half an hour of company time on each one to discover they can't code at all.

yellowcake0 4y ago
It sounds like it is working for that company so more power to them I suppose, and I've certainly done my fair share of coding tests and take home assignments, however I consider it personally disrespectful to automate the initial interview round in this way. If you're asking me to put in work, even if it's an ostensibly short task, I want to talk to someone first.
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  Well, ok, everybody sees things their own way. Personally, I would be glad to do a short take home if it's clear that it will reduce the bullshit analysis of curriculum. I'd be even happier if it replaced a whiteboard FizzBuzz, and would raise good flags if it was a mathy problem like the ones the OP talked about, instead of unmotivated terminal or memory juggling.
- kube-system 4y ago
  I agree, it's disrespectful. I always give people the opportunity to speak with a human about the job before requiring they invest any time on an assignment. Seeing if someone has the skills to do the job is secondary to determining if the job is a fit in plain-english conversation.

pfoof 4y ago

Ask for a Docker/VM image, some build script like Gradle or Makefile and .editorconfig. Without that, the actual job might be just as frustrating

pauljonas 4y ago

This is a thing now when applying for developer jobs. When I was looking for a job in 2020-2021, I think it happened everywhere I got past the original opening interview round. Sometimes the task was trivial or even submitting code samples (which can be problematic if the relevant examples were done for a previous proprietary interest that would not be agreeable to share this code). Other cases were more elaborate, requiring a half-day of work or more. In one instance, I had an assignment for a front end JS / UX page, completed the assignment then heard back from the prospective employer that according to their review of my "homework" submission, I was overqualified for the position. I mean, you can say "no", but then in all probability the prospective employer is going to proceed to the next candidate.

twawaaay 4y ago

I don't give take-home test tasks. I believe this is a waste of time for the company because it gives pretty much no useful information. A well written solution says nothing -- it could even potentially have been outsourced to somebody else. It also causes the candidate to waste as much time as possible because the candidate will feel pressed to spend every bit of time to further polish the solution. I think if I was to refuse take-home task this would be the exact official reason: Because I believe take-home tasks are unfair and incentivise candidates to waste as much time as possible for no benefit for the company. Instead, I do pair programming session debugging a piece of code and unit tests. It is not about the solution, it is about getting to know the candidate as he/she is working on a task.

photochemsyn 4y ago

This response in the comments: > "The test was as much about seeing if the if the candidate could deal with manually setting up the build environment without assistance as much as it was about the coding problem itself. If the candidate couldn't get the tools installed on his own or felt insulted it wasn't his ideal IDE, then they figured the candidate would not do well as an embedded engineer on more complicated boards with even worse tool chains." In general however a take-home test voids the primary rationale for the real-time on-site coding interview, which is that it's very easy these days to complete such tests without knowing much about the material via various routes, as academic CS programs continue to demonstrate. It's also true that academic CS programs tend to be terrible when it comes to learning about tools, toolchains, build systems, virtual environments, etc. There are some efforts to change this at least: https://missing.csail.mit.edu/ https://missing.csail.mit.edu/ Even that's not that comprehensive. Searching "introduction to toolchains and complex build systems" reveals how difficult the issue is. It's the kind of thing that should probably be included in the job description.

kube-system 4y ago
Yes, I find that students straight out of school understand the concepts of coding, but have trouble applying their knowledge. Knowing how to write a function in Python is one thing, but if you can't install it on a computer and use it to solve a problem, you're not going to be productive unless we have other employees who will do those things for you. And some organizations do. Particularly the large organizations that hire lots of students straight out of school.

wootland 4y ago

Giving people take home tests or leet code challenges is a backwards hiring process. Why as a manager are you wasting your time and the candidate's time "discovering" if they can code when there's millions of developers who are actively working in the open on OSS platforms like GitHub? I don't give tests, I don't give technical interviews. I scout amazing developers and try to convince them to join my team. Not only do you get top notch people like that (who very much appreciate not being "tested"), you also save a ton of time. Your job as a manager is to proactively search for the best people possible to join your team, hire them and keep them as happy as humanly possible.

matthewmacleod 4y ago
You will certainly be able to find excellent developers that way. You'll also automatically rule out the vast majority of amazing developers that aren't "actively working in the open on OSS platforms".
- wootland 4y ago
  If I can quickly hire as many amazing candidates as needed using this method, then I don't really have a need to try to find the needle in the haystack that are the great devs in the global community of all devs using technical interviews. That's a very wasteful process.
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> Why as a manager are you wasting your time and the candidate's time "discovering" if they can code when there's millions of developers who are actively working in the open on OSS platforms like GitHub? The number of developers who have something recent and meaningful on GitHub is extremely small. I’ve interviewed and hired a lot of great developers. Very few of them had much of anything on GitHub. Often the most I could find were one-line patches to projects somewhere. If you limit your hiring to GitHub OSS superstars, you’re going to miss out on a massive number of excellent developers.
- wootland 4y ago

DeathArrow 4y ago

When I interviewed for my current position, I had a home assignment to solve. They said 2-3 hours which transformed in 2-3 days over the weekend for me. I really wanted to do a good job, so I thought it thoroughly, did it and modified it until the result was the best I could do. Even without taking my time to do the best job possible, it wasn't going to be a 2 hours job, but at least a 4 or 5 hours job. It will never going to last as they say. For one reason, persons giving these tests are underestimating the time. And if I said that I don't want the test, they wouldn't have hired me, which would be a shame. :) At other interviews when I got to choose between live coding or sessions with questions and home assignments, I've always have chosen home assignments and always got an offer.

apwheele 4y ago
Being a former professor, to do good tests is really hard. The vast majority of take home tests are quite poor that I have seen (in data science at least). I am skeptical most people even attempt to do their own tests they create, I commonly see people suggest things will be 2-4 hours when they will be a day or two of work, https://www.bryanshalloway.com/2020/10/27/should-you-use-an-assignment-or-exercise-as-part-of-your-hiring-process-for-a-data-scientist/ https://www.bryanshalloway.com/2020/10/27/should-you-use-an-....
- siva7 4y ago
  I know of some management colleagues who are fast at compiling interview tasks but i know they never did their tasks themselves and you could tell just how bad these tasks were.
dilyevsky 4y ago
The reason is simple - nobody there has done it or if they did lied about how much it took

Mizoguchi 4y ago

I don't think being (reasonably) late matters much as long as you do a good job. Try giving a bit more than asked and explain your thought process clearly. If you can't come up with a full solution at least mention what you would like to try if you had more time. ALWAYS write in a positive tone, try avoiding words like "can't" and "difficult". Provide a short summary about what you learned with the test. I got offers this way despite being late for several hours or even days.

cm2012 4y ago

Work sample tests and IQ are the only thing in the whole hiring song and dance that correlate to future performance. And it's legally questionable to test IQ.

dcow 4y ago

What is the difference between a take home test that takes 4 hours and a company asking you to take a day off to come interview with 5 different people, other than one being less of a time commitment than the other? In a remote first, or at least remote friendly, world, take home tests seem inevitable.

dilyevsky 4y ago
The difference is all the cost is beared by the candidate
AnimalMuppet 4y ago
Skin in the game. If I take a day off and come in for an interview, it's going to take them a day of their time, too. They're not going to waste my time, because it's their time, too. But for a take home, it costs my time, but not theirs. They have little incentive to be considerate of my time, because they don't feel the pain.

di456 4y ago

An alternative is to give the candidate a choice of a live coding exercise or a take home project. Some people work better one way or the other. It sets them up for success rather than making a take home project an arbitrary filter. And I hope the same take home project is used for every candidate and it's not a scam to get work done for free.

thrwy_918 4y ago

I would imagine that most employers have no idea how long their take-home tests actually take, because there is a strong incentive for interviewees to lie about how long they spent on the test, and almost no incentive to be honest. Yes, you can have your own engineers estimate how long it should take, but those engineers i) are already familiar with your problem domain and tooling, assuming the take-home test is reflective of those, ii) estimating is hard, even for small tasks, and iii) also don't have any incentive to name a high number vs. a low number, because a low number will make them look more competent I have completed many take-home tests for jobs I wanted, and I don't think I have ever been honest about how long such a test took.

siva7 4y ago
Yep, the question "How long did you take for the test" is so universally useless that i'm left wondering how so many management colleagues are that clueless to take the answers at face value. It's also oftentimes that people don't bother to do the very own tasks they themselves designed.

danwee 4y ago

Take-home tests are the worst. This is why: - it doesn't value equally candidate's time and company's time. The candidate has to spend hours/days to do the test, while the company evaluates the result in minutes (1h at most) - they are always open-ended, so you can always do more... that means the more hours you put on it the higher the chance of passing. So, if I spend 4h, but you spend 10h, all things equal, you got the job - if they are underspecified and you dare to ask questions... be ready for a huge email-thread coming and long waiting times (in the order of hours instead of in the order of seconds/minutes as it would be the case if you were doing the test "online" with them) - if you ask questions: how many questions is good enough? Maybe I'm asking too many? Or too few? I cannot really tell by the way they write their email answers to me (I could tell if I were asking the questions in a video-call, though... but damn it, this is a home-take test!)

kube-system 4y ago
Companies that do take homes that way are bad. They don't have to be done that way. They should be limited in duration intentionally to respect people's time and to keep things fair between candidates.
- danwee 4y ago
  That doesn't work either. If I send you a take-home test and I set the duration of it to be 3 days: what if you (think) you are done in 4 hours? Will you just send it? Or will you spend more time on it because, well, maybe other people are spending the actual 24*3 hours on that take-home test? Maybe they add documenation that can be viewed directly in the command line? Maybe they add a better (bigger) set of test cases? Maybe they even go further the specs of the problem and hand over an actual reusable piece of library (which you didn't because based on your judgment, the task could have been done in 4 hours easily, without the need to write a library out of it, and so that's what you did rightly). Take-home tasks are the wrong solution to this difficult problem of our that is hiring.
  - kube-system 4y ago
    All of those durations are way too long. 2 or 3 hours is pushing it. That is plenty enough time to determine whether a candidate can write code.

aintgonnatakeit 4y ago

How are these relevant in the age of LLMs? Prompt hack a little, run the exercise through it, edit some things, done.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

When I read the title, I thought this was going to be a story about one of those ridiculous take-home tests that requires multiple days of work to complete. Reading the post (and some of the crucial follow up comments), it appears the author spent 2 hours with the environment they provided and gave up: > Currently, I'm about 2 and a half hours in, trying to get my virtual environment to run the baseline code they provided. Reading between the lines (and from the comments/follow ups) I think the take-home challenge might be working as designed: Filtering out candidates who are not yet experienced enough to handle the type of work the company does. The author’s desire to substitute some of their own, different, code samples as evidence of qualification is likely missing the point: Quickly getting the code to run in the provided environment was part of the challenge. We had a similar problem at a past company where we cast too broad of a net for candidates: When we did no-prep trials of the take-home challenge among team members who hadn’t seen it yet, completion times were all under one hour. When we gave it to loosely-screened candidates, we got several complaints from people who said they were on hour 8 and still couldn’t make a lot of progress. Tightening up our pre-screening mostly fixed that problem. It’s not good to waste candidate’s time if they’re not going to be qualified.

kamaal 4y ago
>>I thought this was going to be a story about one of those ridiculous take-home tests that requires multiple days of work to complete. Every single take home test I have ever taken. It took multiple days to finish. And even after finishing it, you still don't get the job. In one place I not only finished the test. Their onsite interview was made up of four more rounds. The first two were about implementing two features on the spot where two of their engineers watched as I wrote the code. And then in the third round they review your code. All onsite. I not only finished the original assignment, added the two features requested and substantiated every single query on code they had in the code review round. Yet in the last round, they rejected me because I didn't read their employee's favorite paper. And therefore must be a bad programmer. And this is the one of the most famous company in Bangalore which routinely brags about hiring programmers only on the basis of take home tests. The whole take home test thing is a giant fraud. Don't fall for it. They are not serious about hiring you. Serious people know whom to hire after an hour or two of discussions. Also contrary to whatever people think about the archetype inefficient programmer who fails at fizzbuzz, most people can actually code. This whole take home test thing is a marketing campaign and generally a way for in house programmers to make themselves feel superior by routinely asking candidates to finish projects in impossible timelines and yet reject them like they are gods.

JJMcJ 4y ago

Elaborate setup: maybe some candidates will already have it. If it requires a gig of downloads, and a bunch of configuration files, it's over the top. Also, does it have business value? If so, it gets more suspicious.

rongenre 4y ago

A perspective: I've had two jobs which started with take-home tests. Honestly, I found them fun - they were maybe on the level of a 2nd or 3rd year undergrad CS homework assignment. The jobs also were the ones I stayed around for the longest.

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loxias 4y ago

Not sure what's going on here, the premise of the post ticks me off. How to politely decline a take-home test is to decline it. Unsure how anyone who can't do take home tests is qualified to do the underlying work. Make room for those of us who THRIVE on take home tests and struggle at whiteboard interviews, I'll be happy to take that job.

JustSomeNobody 4y ago

Setting up the VE was probably part of the "test" and if you took all your time (and failed) setting it up, you failed the take home. You should have asked questions if you were having issues. Generally [0], people want to hire good candidates, not shit on people who aren't yet ready. Asking questions doesn't mean you're not ready. Not asking means you definitely are not ready. [0] Yes, there are some assholes out there that love to torture candidates. Seriously.

dordoka 4y ago

Just say "No, thank you" and move on to the next opportunity.

world2vec 4y ago

Do doctors, lawyers, civil engineers, etc, also do take-home tests? Honest question, I don't know how other knowledge workers get hired. I know fashion designers (like my gf) do have really long and demanding take-home tests and then at the end they don't pass to the next stage... Weeks of late nights and no weekends for nothing, repeat several times.

peoplearepeople 4y ago

It's just a "No thanks, bye."

olliej 4y ago

I still don’t understand the purpose of take home tests. They’re either substantial enough that it should be paid, which puts the candidate in a difficult position given that they already have a job. Moreover if you see anything interesting in their solution, it likely belongs to their current employer so whatever they wrote is tainted, and anyone who reads it and then does something similar may also be tainted. If it’s not substantial enough to be interesting you can just stick to standard interviews which also mitigates the risk of cheating.

pengaru 4y ago

Reading the comments here has me horrified... At what point did programming exercises during interviews for programming roles become anything more than a litmus test to weed out fraudsters early in the process? It's not supposed to be an unpaid hazing ritual, don't turn it into one. We're talking about technical engineering positions here folks. Once you've filtered out the frauds have a technical deep-dive conversation with the person that is germane to the role and their CV. You need to vet their communication and collaboration abilities and fit anyways. A take-home exercise doesn't produce any of that information. It's _deep_ in diminishing returns land vs. having them spit out a toy program from blank slate -> executable in a few minutes. If they struggle with that, you likely have a fraud, end the process, NEXT. There's a reason a month would pass before benefits kick in; it's enough time to see if they can do the actual job and get along with everyone.

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noisy_boy 4y ago

In one of the recent interviews, they told that I needed to do a 4-hour coding assignment (in one sitting) to implement an order matching system. I appreciated telling me that upfront so I that I could simply say I am not interested in proceeding with the role. Wasn't difficult at all for both parties.