I prefer the take home project to be honest. Lately i've been getting this weird live coding interviews that make you download some huge arse project then ask you to do some difficult live coding in 5 - 10 mins, please bruh just give me a home assignment and let me take my time

I'm a lead developer, with a hot take. When I do interviews it's my job to ask the right question to highlight if the person in my interview can do the job or not. That's all that matters to me. Doesnt matter if they fumble or panic or whatever.... There is potential in everyone, I just need to make sure I'm capable of using their potential during work, that's all. All these tests are so pointless its incredible. I'm here to lead you so our projects work out, that's all. Lot of people judge me saying I under prepare for interviews or sometimes I'm quick at saying yes, but everyone that worked under me loved it and most of them did a good job. Jobs aren't hard when there isn't a dickhead nitpicking your every move

I dont aspire to be a software engineer, but i follow videos like these because its interesting to see how weirdly out of touch these companies are these days. They must dont understand we more than likely already have full time jobs, and for them to expect you to do homework in YOUR free time only to more than likely be ghosted is straight scummy in my opinion. It seems they only aim for the most desperate of candidates

There should be oversight on these coding assignments because you never know if the company is using these projects for actual production development. This is also happening in IT such as computer networking.

Home assignments that take longer than 5 hours can go to hell. And that's me being generous. I had an interview with a company that said the assignment takes from 3-5 working days. Are these people unhealthy? They never heard from me again.

for someone who is weak in leetcode problems like me, much prefer to take home assignment. leetcode problems in interviews take so much time to practice.

I did a take home assignment for my current job with a large company. I designed a full app that communicated with apis and included unit testing. They said it would take 4 hours but I probably spent 8 on it. I still prefer it to leetcode

I prefer take home assignments over most interview processes for the specific reasons you mentioned. HOWEVER, there are companies now that will give actual work to interviewees and basically treat it like a free consulting session, which is not okay. I always time box take home exercises to two hours and it can't be something that a company could potentially use in production. You should get paid for your labor.

I ended up doing a take-home assignment for my current job that was some ridiculously difficult encryption/decryption algorithm and dataset task, and it probably took me 30 hours at least to figure out the solution. However, I've done a few take-home assignments before, as well as on-site interviews. In no case did I hear anything back. It's just the nature of doing business in IT. The market is absolutely saturated with great talent as well as huge numbers of lesser talent.

I assume the author is talking about the job market of US. What I've seen in Europe(Germany specifically) that there is no standard of software interviews like in US. In US it's leetcode. In Germany most of the time they ask for home assignment, and most of the time they give you 1-2 weeks. And usually the home project differentiate wildly, so there is no similar ones. Every company wants you to start providing results from day 1, so they want exactly to know the technology they are using at the moment, which they reflect in home project. Sometimes they tell you that it should take couple of hours, but there is no upper limit if you want to spend more time. Definitely there are candidates who are willing to spend more time(for example newly graduated students). And then it's a question of should I spend more time. And you do the home project for free of course. In case of Germany you wouldn't even allowed to work for some payment(assuming you already have a job and want to switch to another company), because by law there is a hard limit of 48 hours per week that you can work and 8 hours per day. So I guess even if companies were to pay for home project it would lead to a lot bureaucratic mess for both sides, as you also then need to show that extra money you gained and basically could show only 8 hours that you worked on Saturday(Sunday is not allowed, and the rest days you are full time employed)and just in case to not mess up tax declaration you would need a person who will do it for you(they are not cheap), and it may happen that all the money you earned that way will be eaten by tax declaration guy. And at the end most of the time you don't hear back after spending your evenings(after work) and weekend on the home project. Usually Europe is known for work-life balance. But let's say if you apply for 52 positions and each of them asks you to do home project without calling back, basically you work non-stop for the entire year. In that regards I like leetcode approach, once you prepare yourself for one company you are ready for all others. And also I am sure that the company spends at least the same amount of time on interviews with me as I do. Not like with home project where they could even not look at your 2-week work.

I always first assess the take-home assignment. If I feel that it takes longer than 2hrs AND doesn't seem meaningful (in that I'd likely learn something new), I'd immediately bail the interview process.

He forgot to mention the biggest elephant in the room There are many, I many companies particularly startups and the like that give this take home assignment. They are not use to evaluate the candidates. No, they are using it to get free work done. They collect the coding assignments, then use them to build their project out. It is a way to get free labor from skilled talent.

The biggest issue with take home projects is that most companies don't set a hard time limit. I think a majority of people work past the suggested time limit, meaning that you'll have to put in more time and effort to stand out. Even then, you're not guaranteed to move on to the next round. If you aren't getting many interviews then this might be a worthwhile tradeoff. Otherwise, it seems to be more trouble than it's worth.

Very good analysis.

Thanks for the insights

From my side, Im really happy to get such an assignment in compare coding in an interview on the white board under pressure. I will have my time to think and can come up with a solution, as I do in the real work as well. I also will know what the work later in the company likely is about and can decide if I want to go this route further. Doing some Leetcode is of course useful too, to sharpen the algorithmic and math skills. So I have also no problem if they ask for live coding. However, I prefer to solve problems on my own without couple eyes observing me.

did one recently not for a faang but it was ridiculously hard, not only had to refactor an already +- good designed mvc and improve the performance of it, andd add features on top of it in less than 2h

A disadvantage I see with this approach is, you have to learn the technology of each company. I had to learn nestJS to do one of this assignments and deploy a endpoint, it was a nightmare. Mind you that this is not a devOps specific role but a junior backend one but it required you to configure docker, set up development enviroment and deploy to google cloud. I was wake until 4am of the last day trying to deploy it while I had to get to my actual job by 9am. Another problem I see with this assignment is increasingly high expectations of the candidates. To filter out candidates you keep increasing the difficulty of this assignments, which in the end will only lead to cheating... This assignemnts are not a good test to everyday work because you lose a lot of time setting up new environments and learning technologies you might never use. If you are a junior developer, you hardly even have the fundamentals down. This field already is hard and overwhelming enough, the last thing we need is to put more pressure on junior candidates.

I like take home assessments, but some are incredible complex, so in order for them to be good for both sides they need to be simple but have the ability to showcase the applicant have what they are looking for

Hello person from germany here. In germany it is quite normal to hava a take home project or just a home assessement to filter out canidates especial bigger companies like Simens, Continental, Bosch, BMW and smaler consulting Companies is using test like that even for just a apprentisship ( you need to kow a classic apprenticeships takes 3 years)

One thing not mentioned is that it also gives the candidate insight to the company. Anyone ever do a take home assignment with nonsensical or broken structure? Or you're being asked to do an assignment that doesn't match the job posting? A job interview is a two way street. While they're interviewing you, you're interviewing them. The fit should work both ways. Definitely easier said than done if you actually need a job.

I had a take home assignment for an SDET position. The task was to build an automation framework from scratch including creating a git repository for it and a readme

I prefer take homes that are an existing project that is similar to the companies code base that just has some issues that need to be addressed. Even better if they provide tickets for things to do. Then you sit down and review what you did and why. I’ve still yet to have any kind of really hard algorithmic problems but I’m not applying to major tech companies.

One reason I would be against take home assignments is that work done for the assignments themselves may have value, and you are basically giving it away to the company for free, just for a chance of getting a job. If you are willing to do this, then that's your decision, but it shouldn't become something that is standard - if it is then it should be regulated to prevent abuse. People have their own trade secrets and intellectual property they should protect as well, whether they realize it or not. A company might not be able to see people's best qualities, because the applicant might consider it too valuable to give it away.

Personally, I am all for it, but only as long as you can clearly see that what you are coding for them isn't obvious free work. For instance, if a company builds android applications, but asks you to build a fibbonaci calculator app, it is very unlikely that they will try to use your code. Always remember, that whatever code project you do, you can always reuse the codes. Most companies are gonna ask you to write codes for similar algorithms, and if that's not the case, chances are they try to get free labor reframed as a take-home assigment. Here is my take. If you are good at coding, and you are good at selling, then the only thing they should care about is your portfolio. In fact, some of the clients I have had, didn't even look at my portfolio. They just took my words for it when I explained them the projects I have done before. If a company asks you to do a take-home assigment, read the assigment and ask yourself if the code you make is something you can reuse for future interviews or even, for future tools for yourself.

I would ask the following with a take-home assignment: Is the assignment representative of the work that I will do? If I don't enjoy the assignment, I will turn down the job. Does the company claim any intellectual property rights to the assignment so that I can add it to my Github portfolio? I got turned down for a job because of the tech stack that I chose for the assignment. Specifically, they wanted DataBricks and I solved the problem with code using the API. They wanted it to be done with the Databricks UI.

I think a large majority of brilliant engineers have higher levels of anxiety so maybe the take home assignment is better at acquiring better talent. However, you can definitely just cheat on it

Take home assignment is good as upfront before interview. I prefer ones that are real world problem

I wrote an entire app over a week BEFORE talking to anyone in 1 week and knew it was crazy… why!?!

hate take homes assignments fr

I prefer take home assignments. It is very stresfull to be given a problem and expected to solve it while an interviewer is staring at you. Plus they expect you to talk about the problem before hand. Well i am a quite person, i like to think quietly, draw some diagrams. But when somebody is staring at you i cant do that. I went through two interviews with two faang companies, Both times i solved all problems but i did nit get the job because i jumped into coding and did nit talk about the problem first. I think its uncontitutional to put somebody under such stress. So take home tests are much better even if it takes me 3 days to do it.

This is good news to me. I never understood why companies give these ridiculous leetcode problems that are also many times scored by time taken as well as accuracy.

I've interviewed at all the big companies for SWE positions in the last few years and I haven't had a single take home assignment.

I dont mind them but if theyre paired with 8 rounds of interviews, the company can suck it

Low key I wish it started out with take home projects and not 30 minute questions that you'll never encounter on the job

The new standard is working for free for the corporations benefit. Think about this way. Would a corporation hire you if they had to jump through hoops for you? Corporations at this point are known to do shady stuff

Why? Because the candidates pool is no so awfully diluted by all those bootcamp "graduates", self-taughts, drop-outs and graduates of the very sub-par universities, that there is simply no other way to filter them all out fairly.

take homes are such a waste of time. also asking for a cover letter that is read by AI and not even a real person.

If this is true this is a good thing.

I would prefer take home to leetcode style interview.

My problem with take homes because they end up taking 6+ hours

I prefer to take home assignments

Take home is cool, but some very few companies rip you off and use those assignments for themselves.

It's typical to never speak to an actual engineer until you pass the take home tech screen. Usually you start with an engineering manager. Also, coding interviews are trash because you have diminished "working memory" since you're doing two things at once.

Take home assignment = 200 EUR

I notice that, kinda like it. Helps me brush up

This is the thin vs thick client discussion all over again. Thick clients benefit the server (the employer) because it expects the client (engineers applying to the job) to do the computing (code a small project). Problem is: I already have a job and as much as I like coding and problem solving, I'm not eager to spend hours of my free time coding some random project that is not guaranteed to land me a new job. If you, the employer, are interviewing me it's because you need me so it only makes sense that you spend hours of your time in this process. My time is valuable too.

My strategy is to create projects with the goal of making profit, and as the projects get better one of two things are bound to happen: 1. One or more projects will make enough money to live on 2. Someone from some company will realize "Hey, this guy could probably make US a bunch of money!"

I would say candidate please reject doing the take home. 1 this shows the companies don’t care about the candidates. 2 some companies assign some of their tasks/blockers as a take home and steal the work from the candidates for free. 3 pay attention to the reputation of the company. It is reputable, perhaps it makes sense to do the take home for the position, otherwise it is not worth your time, as the company may not be serious about the candidate in the first place.

As long as you get paid to do it

what are your proofs that FANG companies doing take home assignment ? If they are not doing it they it doesn't matter

I prefer leetcode

The take-home assignment will benefit the candidate from a software engineering job interview regardless of the end result. The candidate will learn a lot from doing the project and gaining the confidence in using certain programming languages and frameworks in the process. Even if the candidate did not get the job in the end, the individual did not lose anything. In fact, he or she had just gained some experience in using the programming languages and frameworks that he or she can confidently put on the resume along with advertising the project he or she had done for the company, which would make his or her resume more impressive. The individual can keep the work and show it for his or her future job interview as a demo to strengthen the persuasion. The take-home assignment is not a loss on one's time and effort, but rather an opportunity to gain a work portfolio to showcase the skills matching up with his or her resume for better persuasion in a job interview.

lol nobody gets interviews, fake