| half-day means four hours. I'm being generous there, because a skilled developer can create a good solution in 2 hours, but many find they want to put around 4 hours in. In terms of what you have to do for the take home to be a success, we explain that fairly clearly these days. I'm now on the 6th version of it because I ask for feedback from the people who do it and try to improve the wording and make it more clear over time. I also provide contact details for people with questions. It's also a fact though that simply achieving the task is not enough if the code you used to do it is sufficiently poorly factored or overcomplicated to a ridiculous extent. We don't mark people down based on superficial coding style. Fails get marked by more than one person, the marking team is small and regularly talks about the individual tests they are marking, but there'll definitely be situations where working code gets marked as fail. The person marking the take home does so before they get access to the CV. They do usually know the name, we'd need a more complicated process to redact names from submissions, but it might be worth doing. I am sure there are ways we can improve our process, and I am aware that there will be lots of companies out there with a process even worse than ours, but I wanted to talk about it, partly as a way of getting feedback with the aim of improving it more, and partly because I hope that others can learn from what we've done. I have been pretty happy about the team we've built with this process compared to teams that I've been involved with building in the past, so there are definitely good parts to it. The two big concerns I have with it are 1. are we being equitable with peoples time and 2. can we reduce the number of skilled candidates who refuse to do it on principle. |