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"Please timebox to an hour" is a bit dodgy though. If one candidate really does that, but the rest give it an extra 2 or 3 hours, that 1 hour candidate will pro

"Please timebox to an hour" is a bit dodgy though. If one candidate really does that, but the rest give it an extra 2 or 3 hours, that 1 hour candidate will probably be at a disadvantage.

neon_electro 3y ago
Thank you for mentioning this. I always find myself going further back and forth with employers who allow a take-home exercise but ask that it be time-boxed nonetheless; it's difficult to try to unpack how they're trying to communicate what kind of time pressure a role experiences, and that if I took longer than their expected time box, does that look bad just because I needed some more time to understand the problem?
- remich 3y ago
  I don't think most employers are out there looking at the timestamps on your commits to see if you really completed it within the timebox or not -- I certainly wouldn't. I don't think that candidates who spend less time or turn in incomplete take homes are necessarily at a disadvantage. Sooo much can be discerned from a take home even if it's not finished. I can evaluate a candidate's familiarity with modern syntax, how they organize functions, how readable their code is, whether or not they used ChatGPT/CoPilot or copy/pasted from an online tutorial (surprisingly easy to discern when you're evaluating many submissions), and so on. All of that tells me a lot about how well someone functions as an engineer, as well as what level they're operating at, and it doesn't require the completion of the take home problem.
  - neon_electro 3y ago
    Thanks for sharing your take. I wish I came across interviewers like yourself in the last 18 months of job searching.
PaulRobinson 3y ago
I often ask for them to version control and send me a zip of the git repo, so I can look at commit histories. Yes, they can fake that, sure, but I can normally tell a lot about a dev from that, and actually if I see 4-5 commits over an hour perhaps with some wrong turns, that pushes the candidate up in my estimation than somebody with 1-2 commits that don't tell a story, but does show a complete solution - which is most likely what would happen if you edited history a bit.
- kaashif 3y ago
  When I'm actually writing code and hashing out a solution over the course of a single hour in my job, I'm not going to commit the wrong turns. What you're really asking for is a candidate to spend extra time inventing a convincing git history. I really think the only way this actually works is if the problem is on a page which you can only view after you start a timer or something. Or do it on site and watch them. This is all high pressure but if you really want to time box, there can't be a way around it.

"Please timebox to an hour" is a bit dodgy though. If one candidate really does that, but the rest give it an extra 2 or 3 hours, that 1 hour candidate will probably be at a disadvantage.

neon_electro 3y ago

Thank you for mentioning this. I always find myself going further back and forth with employers who allow a take-home exercise but ask that it be time-boxed nonetheless; it's difficult to try to unpack how they're trying to communicate what kind of time pressure a role experiences, and that if I took longer than their expected time box, does that look bad just because I needed some more time to understand the problem?

remich 3y ago
I don't think most employers are out there looking at the timestamps on your commits to see if you really completed it within the timebox or not -- I certainly wouldn't. I don't think that candidates who spend less time or turn in incomplete take homes are necessarily at a disadvantage. Sooo much can be discerned from a take home even if it's not finished. I can evaluate a candidate's familiarity with modern syntax, how they organize functions, how readable their code is, whether or not they used ChatGPT/CoPilot or copy/pasted from an online tutorial (surprisingly easy to discern when you're evaluating many submissions), and so on. All of that tells me a lot about how well someone functions as an engineer, as well as what level they're operating at, and it doesn't require the completion of the take home problem.
- neon_electro 3y ago
  Thanks for sharing your take. I wish I came across interviewers like yourself in the last 18 months of job searching.

PaulRobinson 3y ago

I often ask for them to version control and send me a zip of the git repo, so I can look at commit histories. Yes, they can fake that, sure, but I can normally tell a lot about a dev from that, and actually if I see 4-5 commits over an hour perhaps with some wrong turns, that pushes the candidate up in my estimation than somebody with 1-2 commits that don't tell a story, but does show a complete solution - which is most likely what would happen if you edited history a bit.

kaashif 3y ago
When I'm actually writing code and hashing out a solution over the course of a single hour in my job, I'm not going to commit the wrong turns. What you're really asking for is a candidate to spend extra time inventing a convincing git history. I really think the only way this actually works is if the problem is on a page which you can only view after you start a timer or something. Or do it on site and watch them. This is all high pressure but if you really want to time box, there can't be a way around it.