[BurningFrog]

The motivation is that you're showing off your skills with this code. You want to deliver the code that, in your opinion, is the best possible for solving the given task.

> which will never be maintained because its a take-home assignment

You will most likely be asked to add a feature or two to it in the followup in person interview.

[LandR]

I've did a few of these take home challenges during the interviewing process.

All of mines have had a time limit to them of an hour. The process has always been

1) arrange a time with the recruiter when I will be free for an hour, e.g.lets say 1PM.

2) recruiter emails me the challenge at around 12:58. I get the challenge and have to code the solution and have it back to the recruiter by 2PM.

Then at the face to face interview we've went through a code review of my code and talked about why I chose to do somethigns the way I did, if I had to more time what would I do differently, was there anything in my solution that I wasn't happy with etc.

Seems to work reasonably well.

There is no way on earth I would be dedicating a weekend or more to an interview task.

[HaloZero]

That's pretty good reason if that's true but setting that expectation would be useful. I've also never had that happen to me.

[BurningFrog]

I think basing the followup interview on the homework task is pretty standard.

You can always have someone else do the "homework" for you, but when you keep working on the same code base you have to show a real understanding of both the problem and your code, and it's quite close to a real work situation.

In hindsight I agree that telling people that will happen would level the playing field a bit.