[stephenhogsten]

These are great points.

How do you feel about take-homes that have an enforced cap at 60-120 minutes to try to remove the competition on time investment?

Do you learn more than it's possible to learn asynchronously? Most take-homes only have candidates write code, but it's possible to understand a candidate more deeply by asking questions about, for example, how they approached the decisions they made.

[kevmo314]

How would such a cap be enforced? If it's due 120 minutes from the time it's given, it's no longer a take home interview, it's a remote interview.

[ghaff]

It doesn't need to be proctored. It would be easy to start a remote clock and the solution needs to be in by x minutes after the start. It can even be pretty generous. The idea is presumably not to see how fast they can sprint but just put some time-boxing in place so some people aren't taking days.

People can get help of course but that's going to be the case absent effectively a remote proctored assignment. And now you're back to effectively in-person.

[thaumasiotes]

> People can get help of course but that's going to be the case absent effectively a remote proctored assignment. And now you're back to effectively in-person.

I would vastly prefer an "in-person" interview in which I wasn't expected to speak to the interviewer to the in-person interviews we actually have. There is a world of difference.

[ghaff]

You don't want to ask questions?

[thaumasiotes]

Why would I want that?

[ghaff]

Because it's an opportunity to learn more about the company beyond what's on their website? Honestly, if I interviewed someone and they had no interest in asking any questions, that's probably an easy reject.

[inanutshellus]

Presumably the difference is that the interviewee gets to choose when to start the clock.

[stephenhogsten]

That's what I had in mind. You would need a tool to enforce it.

At that point "take-home" may not be the best name anymore, but "remote interview" just sounds like it's an interview over video. Maybe "async interview"?

[filoleg]

It is already a thing. I had a 2hr take-home before that was utilizing hackerrank.

But it wasn't a leetcode-style one (which are common), it was a skeleton of a React app, and I had to implement certain methods to tie it all up together.

The timer would start ticking from the moment I click "begin", and it will warn you that the timer will start after you attempt clicking (so that you don't trigger the timer by accident).

[lenzm]

I have used https://takehome.io/. The timer starts when they check out the repo containing the project and instructions.

[smegsicle]

and however it was enforced, it would increase the stress a great deal

[stephenhogsten]

True. More stress than an untimed take-home, but I would think less stress than a normal interview (for most engineers, at least).

[ghaff]

And the reality is that a lot of/most people interviewing in those type of situations arre very well familiar with time-boxed exams at school. (And even with take homes the reality of final exams as I recall is that you mostly didn't have the hours in the day to spend an outsized amount of time on one course.)