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Comment by legohead | Hacker News Reader

> They presented three design challenge options to pick from, with a weeks notice and advised that we should spend no more that 3–5 hours on the task (wink, wink)

I guess as a programmer I'm too logical. You tell me X hours, that's all I'm going to spend. For one of my past interviews I was given a task to make a multiplayer battleship game using whatever I wanted, and was told to spend 2 hours total and they didn't expect me to finish.

I got some rudimentary client/server communication going and that was it. No game logic at all.

Didn't get the job: "However, we would have liked to have seen you get further on the project in the same amount of time."

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I think we interviewed for the same job. I did the same thing, and got the same response.

It was such a short timespan that I assumed it was a trick question, and they wanted to see if I could come up with a creative solution that technically met the requirements but was extremely simple. I implemented a board which you could put pins on, and a text-based chat system using websockets. The idea was that it would work like a table-top simulator.

Nope, turns out they wanted a real solution. I wonder how many companies who use these examples actually attempt them before using them to hire people. My guess is they might be more realistic if they did.

I’d like to code review an example of what a successful hire finished in the allotted time. My guess is the code is bananas.

I bet it wouldn't be hard to knock something out in Squeak or Pharo. They'd probably give you 0 marks for that alone.

Sets up vagrant, python, pip, reads requirements.

Oops, 2 hours.

Yeah, 2 hrs barely touch anything new in my current job, where we have a lot of boilerplater and in-house infrastructure built by the devprod team. Some companies either take those for granted or just deliberately make the bar extra high for arbitrary reasons.

It takes me almost 2 hrs to recover (i.e.: reengage) after meetings...totally unrelated to coding or whatever project I'm working on.

I hope one day, well I actually hope to be alive to see, that one day humanity will have enough understand of the brain to teach us our cognitive limitations and how to effective work around/out them. Not long ago I quit one of my jobs because I simply couldn’t learn to be effective due to meetings and all the interruptions commonly seen in an open office/agile/start-up company. Seriously, I can’t be a better engineer in such environment.

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