As an interviewee, I don’t really feel great about take home exercises. If the exercise is really tight in scope & it’s more of a validation of whether one can

As an interviewee, I don’t really feel great about take home exercises. If the exercise is really tight in scope & it’s more of a validation of whether one can code at all, that’s not so bad, but coding exercises are almost never like that. Coding exercises I’d be ok with: - fix all the bugs in this repo to get the tests to pass - implement a feature to show basic understanding of a concept - do some quiz or puzzle to show you can achieve a discreet objective - refactor some code to clean up a mess - show you can use their SDK in a sane way Ways to evaluate a coding exercise I can support: - if you can complete this exercise, that’s all we care about - we’ll use this exercise to implement another feature in a pair programming exercise - using it as an introduction to the type of work one might be doing - communicating that we like to give candidates a chance to code without the pressure of someone staring at them in a live interview - promising an up or down vote on every exercise submitted - doesn’t require back and forth with a someone to ask a bunch of questions, mostly because it really drags out the interview process Basically if a take home exercise anticipates all the common objections to a take home exercise, tries to address those expectations, and has an attitude of “this sucks for us as much as it sucks for you”, I’m happy to jump through reasonable hoops.