[ufmace]

This whole interview practice seems a bit odd to me. Does anyone else out there give these types of "Homework" assignments to candidates after they've already been through HR and tech interviews? If I gave out an assignment like this at all, I'd be inclined to give it before the on-site interview as a pre-screen. I thought the whole point of such a thing would be to screen out people who can't code at all before they take up valuable man-hours interviewing, with a secondary goal of creating discussion material for a technical interview. Assuming it doesn't completely suck, I'd use part of the technical interview to discuss various aspects of the solution - the merits of frameworks used, tradeoffs of design decisions you made, what would you need to do to scale to 1M users, where are the potential performance bottlenecks and security challenges, etc.

Doing it like this makes me wonder if their real motive is something else. What are they really trying to determine with this sort of test at this time? They do it at a time where there isn't much opportunity to discuss the result, so what's the real goal? Whether, without prompting, you used their favorite language/framework/database and happen to have the same coding style as them? Seems pretty silly to me.

Did you get any possible feeling that maybe they have some hidden or political reason for not wanting to hire you, and threw this test at you as a way to create an excuse for why they won't hire you? That would explain why they gave it after the interviews and don't seem to be interested in discussing why it doesn't meet their standards.

[Jemaclus]

We always give some sort of programming test, usually a dumbed down version of a problem we've recently solved ourselves. You shouldn't have to spend more than two hours on it, if that. Most of the time our applicants say they spent less than an hour on it. It also weeds out a non-zero number of people who aren't really super interested in the position.

[ufmace]

That sounds fine; it's more a question of the timing. I'm guessing you give your test before the in-person interview? That would make a lot more sense to me than doing it after, which they apparently did to OP.

[Jemaclus]

Yes, it's usually "homework" (i.e., send us your resume and your code sample at the same time). I have a "problem solving" task where I expect you to bang out an algorithm (as opposed to code) for the in-person interview. That's mainly just so I can watch you think out loud.

I can teach you my project's programming language... I don't have time to teach you problem solving basics.