[pmiller2]

Those take home tasks are rarely 1 hour deals, so it's not a question of spend an hour at home or take a day off for an on-site. It's usually spend X hours at home and take a day off for an on-site.

Do you really think that "crazy unicode test case" person really only spent an hour on your test?

[viraptor]

> Those take home tasks are rarely 1 hour deals

This seems to be the common complaint, but really this is discussing the idea -vs- the implementation. Some examples here of checking specific things that were not in scope, or tasks that take whole day are really disappointing. And I agree there are loads of really crappy tests out there.

But yes, you can create a test that's easily doable in 1h. As for the crazy edge case tests: probably. It's still a reasonable thing to check for, but often people don't. (having a non-ascii name helps here) If you have simple enough and open-ended enough tasks, I don't think extra time helps the candidates in any way. I mean, either you have experience doing something or you don't. Even if you spent, for example, X hours researching "what does production-ready mean?" and related topics, I don't believe you'd produce as good result as someone with actual experience. (yeah, I could see that in the answer)

[pmiller2]

I will concede the point that if it literally takes an hour, and it means I don't have to write code in the interview with someone watching my every move at all, then, yes, I would gladly do such a test. I'm still skeptical that a test that requires writing production-ready code and tests would really take only 1h.