[csnewb]

I was given a take home project to complete as part of an interview process for one company. I was given 48 hours to implement a basic chat server in Golang. I didn't know Golang, but the hiring manager thought it'd be a good challenge to see how quickly I learn new things and deliver results. I spent an entire weekend learning Go and tried to be honest about using only 48 hours to write the application. I wasn't given any skeleton code, had to implement the whole thing from scratch. I never made an entire web app from scratch especially in language I wasn't familiar with so the learning experience felt like drinking from a firehose. I learned a ton but couldn't complete the project because it was a bit too much on top of my full-time job and going through interviews with other companies, so I submitted my barely functioning code in shame and knew that was automatic rejection right there. I wonder if I'm just a shitty developer or if given enough time I would have been able to make it work.

[mortivore]

Maybe it's just me, but I'm not sure what the point of take home projects like that is. Like my first instinct for something like this is to Google it. Guess what happens when I do google "chat server in golang"? I get a bunch of examples. So do I just copy them/strip them down/combine the examples or do I try to code this thing from scratch with no examples? Guess which I would do in an actual job?

No, you're not a shitty dev. I'm sure given enough time you would have gotten it. Take home projects are weird. They are better than the whiteboarding imo, but only barely.