[mrj]

"Take home assignment with a time limit."

What's your concern there? (Honest question!) I feel terrible about asking for home assignments but I feel like it's good for people like myself who are terrible about coding live. (I usually have a choice of live or homework.) I put a "limit" as a guideline about what kind of quality to expect, usually with language about things not to worry about. I don't expect/want folks to burn a bunch of time on things.

[idopmstuff]

Not OP, but in my experience, it always takes more time than the time limit, either because they've just generally misjudged or because I spent the allotted time, did the case, and then through doing all the work came to some realizations about ways I could have done it better. Then I'm left with the option to either submit something that I know has flaws or spend more time updating it. I don't know about you, but I just hate submitting something that I feel is worse than my abilities, so I end up redoing it and spending much more time.

[Tainnor]

"Soft" limits as guidelines are fine (although in my experience they are often completely unrealistic - e.g. set up a spring boot app with tests, CI config and kubernetes deployment, that implements API XY - all in 4h).

But a hard limit (you will get the assignment at X o'clock and you will have to turn it in within 3 hours) is just bonkers. It's totally unnecessary and artificial time pressure. Maybe I'm having a bad day and I make a silly mistake that takes time to fix - or the assignment is complicated and it takes me half an hour to even understand it and decide on an approach. Or I could implement the assignment in a maintainable way, but the time pressure requires me to do it in the most hacky way possible. Basically, I don't do my best work under time pressure, so I have no idea why you would impose it on me. In my professional experience, there's very rarely ever been any time pressure like that, so it's not like it measures something important.

[stavros]

Hard limits are idiotic, people have things to do, they're doing you a favor spending any time on your assignment. We have soft limits, and it's "this should take around an hour, if it takes much longer please tell us so we can tweak the assignment for the future".

[ghaff]

The main issue is that you can give any guidelines you want but a ton of people will take "Don't spend more than 4 hours on this" with an implied nudge/nudge/wink/wink.

That said, as I wrote elsewhere, if you can't pull a reasonable version of a work product out of a folder, I may be asking you to create one. I'm not necessarily talking code but I absolutely am looking for some proof that you can do the work if it's not already in the wild.

[mrj]

I have had this problem and my assignments really stress that it doesn't even have to be done, we can look at in the meeting and possibly finish small parts together or talk about work that'd be done. But still people do sometimes do far too much and it's not the positive signal they think it is.

[codr7]

Do you compensate them for their time?

If not, why?

How would you feel if they insisted on you doing home assignments?

[mrj]

If somebody has a problem with it, they can always choose the live coding. I try to find ways to make the process more equitable.

[codr7]

So it's either or, and you are most likely losing the best people by insisting.

Maybe that's fine for you, but maybe not.

[mrj]

Yeah I mean.. I have nearly hired people before who turned out to be scammers, no coding skills at all. I need some kind of signal before turning off the recruiting pipeline, emailing a bunch of people "no thanks," and making a commitment. Sometimes strong referrals work but that might unfairly advantage some, can be gamed, and doesn't work at all for most junior devs without a work history. Shoot, even a strong history elsewhere doesn't mean they will be successful on a different product/platform/team/etc.

Both interviews (live and homework) have downsides, referrals don't work for all and hiring blindly isn't an option. I need some kind of signal, some way to choose one of hundreds. I have successfully used contract to hire before, and while that does lower the anxiety on the interview track, many can't consider that option. And that (again) unfairly advantages some.

I.. don't really know. Just over here trying my best. The market is broken in many ways.

[djleroy]

I hear that. But I’ve been burnt by people who “coded live” real well and then couldn’t or wouldn’t do anything for months at work. IMO - any one who is going to be good will be good at coding. It’s not rocket science. Haha. Been around long enough to see language du jour change too. Python also isn’t the end all of languages (we’ve moved on to Julia where I work).

Can you think? Are you curious? Those are hard to distill in an interview and harder still in formulaic interviews.