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by d23
1397 days ago
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These are great in theory. In practice, I've regretted the handful of times I've done them. It seems like some companies use this as a way to "waste" less of their interviewers' time. One particular dysfunctional company that everyone here would recognized gave me the feedback: you're one of the candidates out of nearly 200 that did this [7-10 hour take home test] and passed! Then they ghosted me for a month before asking me to come on for a full day onsite. |
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Their fatal issue on the hiring side is that they take too much time to properly score.
If you ask a good candidate to work for 4+ hours, they'll produce code that will cost 2+ hours of a great engineer to thoroughly check.
Lots of companies are very fond of giving candidates huge tasks and having them spend 4+ hours on these. But practically no company will have their best senior engineers (a very scarce resource) dedicate dozens of hours per month to check these tasks.
Hence, these tasks effectively never receive the resources required to properly check them. Especially at the more senior level. If you're hiring a senior engineer, and giving them a 4 hour homework task, a staff-level engineer would have to spend 2-3 hours to properly check it.
Forget about it, that's not happening.
Instead, these teams do ask the senior engineer to take 4 hours to work on the task. However, once the hard part arrives, the team will never check it properly. They'll assign some junior engineer for an hour to check it.
The team won't care, because it's the candidate's time being wasted, while theirs is efficiently preserved. Plus, our junior engineers are so amazing, they can certainly score the work of a senior in less than an hour.