[endtime]

I've never been asked to do a take home interview assignment, but I actually have the opposite attitude. I would much rather spend a few hours putting together that I feel good about than spend 10x the time cramming interview prep.

[intelVISA]

I prefer a take home over some LC as you can learn a lot more by seeing somebody's repo, tests, code, etc. than their rote ver of reversing a linked list ...but LC is cheap, a take home that respects the developer's time isn't.

[noirbot]

Or, you know, you don't cram for the interview and just do as well as you can and let them evaluate on that. If you give me a meaningless take-home assignment, I have to actually write working code for it that looks good. If there's a trivial problem in an in-person interview, I can often "blah blah blah" through the more rote parts unless they really ask for details.

There's no wiggle room on a take-home. The code you write either does the thing or it doesn't. If you don't remember the exact way to do something in an in-person interview, you can express your general understanding to the interviewer and probably get some/all the credit of actually knowing it.

[endtime]

> Or, you know, you don't cram for the interview and just do as well as you can and let them evaluate on that.

Sure, depends how much you want the job and what your general approach is. If it's a competitive job then you want to optimize for the interviews. Last time I interviewed, the potential impact on my income and net worth over the next decade was significant, so I took it pretty seriously.

[noirbot]

Oh sure, but then as the interviewer, your take-home is also likely to be gamed by someone cramming for that too. Motivated people can always do too much work for a project. Whether it's a live coding thing, a take home exam, or a whiteboard problem, none of them really give a solution where someone isn't going to spend 100 hours prepping.

[andrewingram]

I did one that was time limited (2 hours, automatically timed and enforced). The exercise wasn't hard, but it did have some tedious quirks which meant I wasted quite a bit of time. But I thought "fine, I can jump through this 2 hour hoop". After I submitted it, it turned out there were some previously undisclosed extra steps where I had to record videos doing the kind of things i'd expect to do in an actual interview (talk through my solution, and talk about a project I'm proud of). I immediately lost interest.