[kamaal]

This is one more problem, programmers are really bad at estimating time required for completion. When it comes to these things programmers designing the interview tend under estimate the effort required to finish the projects.

What makes this whole thing complicated is how they go about measuring quality, extensibility, or if they measure feature completion.

Most companies that give you a take home assignment also get you onsite for one or two sessions of code review and feature addition.

If you don't take into account quality or extensibility you fail in the next rounds.

By no means are these 2 hour projects. Most of these projects take at least a few days to do well.

In some cases the person designing the questions just overshoots the measurement. I've heard sometimes they ask you do come up with a feature loaded contacts iOS app in like a weekend.

[bagacrap]

Programmers are bad at estimating time to completion for their own work, it's true. But to ask them to estimate someone else's time is unfair because that depends heavily on the individual. Some will finish in 2 hours, and that is probably who they'd like to hire.