[autarch]

When I've created these sorts of take homes I always do them myself and have at least 1 other person on the team do them. My thinking was that we should be able to do them in 1.5 hours if we tell the candidate it will take then up to 3 hours. I would give my own time to complete it as the expected time for a candidate.

[seriousman123]

You can't create the take home yourself because you're drawing on your own personal domain experience.

For example I'm an expert on real time video streaming in embedded systems. It's trivial to me to program a real time system that will stream video at a lower resolution in real time from scratch. I pass that problem to your average backend web developer they're going to take 100x longer then me.

The issue is, while it may seem obvious to you that the domain is too specialized, when you yourself spend to much time in a specific domain you become biased and you start to think such knowledge is basic because you get too good at it. It's invisible to you.

Time shouldn't be the factor measured here because people have such varied backgrounds.

[autarch]

The take homes I created in the past were not so extremely domain specific. They were relatively common problems like "read these JSON files and generate a tree of dependencies between them based on references, where file1.json might contain an item like 'file2.json'".

[maest]

If I'm hiring for a real time video streaming platform, I probably don't want to hire a backend dev who has 0 experience in the field and takes 100x thr time, so this seems fine.

The point of the assignment isn't to make it "fair" (in some loose sense), but to filter out candidates.

[sgerenser]

True to some extent, but you usually don’t want to filter out all candidates who don’t have extensive experience in the exact domain you’re working in, otherwise you’d never hire anyone.