[monksy]

I've had a few take home projects that weren't so bad.

But the last one I did...

A junior just basically shat all over the project and claimed a lot of things.

[The submission was to write a few sample sort functions for a library... the recruiter asked for an app, the paper asked for a library.. I did both... what did I get shat upon for? The user interface/cli that wasn't required.. another thing.. Why did I have 66 commits?]

[nsfyn55]

yuck! why did you have 66 commits?

[monksy]

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9973172

[philbarr]

What's wrong with having 66 commits?

[nilkn]

This is a completely generic response which is not at all tailored to the above poster's specific situation (since I'm not familiar with the details), but the general idea would be something like this:

If you asked someone to do FizzBuzz at home and they sent you a git repo with 60+ commits, you wouldn't be a little puzzled about that? That would seem to suggest they really struggled with it.

[pd1]

That's not really a fair comparison though. It would be more like a typical "whiteboard coding" problem needing a couple commits.

[nilkn]

I'm not really sure what you mean. We don't know what the task was that he had to solve. I was providing an example of a situation in which 66 commits could be seen as a bad thing.

For a typical whiteboard coding problem, I also wouldn't want to see 60+ commits.

[bjones22]

I remember when I first got started with git I committed at an absurd frequency. I don't think it's that unreasonable for someone straight out of college to be relatively new to git, and thus do the same thing.

I remember later on I wrote a script that listened to git hooks and rebuilt my project on a remote server. I was still testing manually at that time, as we all do in the beginning, which resulted in a large number of commits so that I could view the results on the server.

I think it's ok to ask "why do you have so many commits?" but not "why do you have so many commits?!?!?!". It's also not ok to ASSUME that a large number of commits is a bad thing automatically, unless you have reasons far better then any submitted in this thread.

[monksy]

For a whiteboard coding problem, you're really not going to see more than a function. So I completely agree with you.

[pd1]

I meant saying Fizzbuzz with 66 commits is not a fair comparison to a library having 66 commits.