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I recently completed an interview junket. One of the companies I really wanted to get into gave me a take home. I completed it in the time they said it would take, submitted it, and then got bounced out. My inside source said that the submissions are run through an acceptance test suite (not exposed to the interviewee, of course) that can automatically bounce people out of the process with no or little human intervention.

PROTIP: don’t do that.

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That doesn't sound fair unless the acceptance test suite is available to the candidate before final submission. In which case, depending on how the infrastructure is set up, could be expensive or slow. Seems to be a lose-lose situation.

Why not do that? Coming from the other side of table, an immense amount of engineer-hours are devoted to the interviewing process, including code review on take-home assignments. Thus we try to make the process efficient. Typically there's a set of unit tests provided in the assignment to help the interviewee, and a hold-out set of unit tests that gives us a score for basic correctness. The score, albeit a low bar, is a useful threshold for eliminating candidates unlikely to succeed in the process. Those above the threshold have their code passed on to an engineer to review beyond basic correctness, and move on in the interview process.

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