[thrwy_918]

I would imagine that most employers have no idea how long their take-home tests actually take, because there is a strong incentive for interviewees to lie about how long they spent on the test, and almost no incentive to be honest.

Yes, you can have your own engineers estimate how long it should take, but those engineers i) are already familiar with your problem domain and tooling, assuming the take-home test is reflective of those, ii) estimating is hard, even for small tasks, and iii) also don't have any incentive to name a high number vs. a low number, because a low number will make them look more competent

I have completed many take-home tests for jobs I wanted, and I don't think I have ever been honest about how long such a test took.

[siva7]

Yep, the question "How long did you take for the test" is so universally useless that i'm left wondering how so many management colleagues are that clueless to take the answers at face value. It's also oftentimes that people don't bother to do the very own tasks they themselves designed.