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Comment by heavyset_go | Hacker News Reader

For every "20 min max" take home assignment, there will be people who are willing to spend 4+ hours doing it to outshine candidates who have jobs, families and lives.

If you want to make it more of a fair consideration of time, consider moving your take home to interviews, that way there isn't a time cost asymmetry. You can enforce your "20 min max" claim this way, you can judge a candidate's performance, thought process and filter out anyone who is LLMing or spending inordinate amounts of time on them.

You will also make a better impression on candidates by investing your time in them in the same way they are with you. Maybe you're hiring kids out of college without experience, but you only have to do so many take home tests before you realize that they're a waste of time, and pass on potential employers who throw them at you, or you learn to just send them your hourly rate for the test.

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One other way to keep things true to the “20 min max” is to have a clear objective/scoring rubric. Nothing open ended (data science jobs LOVE handing out open ended data analyses). I need to know that it’s okay to stop and that anything I’m doing would just be overkill.

Live coding during an interview is one of the most oppressive things I’ve witnessed in the industry in general.

There is usually a huge disconnect between someone who knows that “this task should take 20mins” and doing it cold in a super high-pressure environment.

People sweat, panic, brain freeze, and are just plain out stressed.

I’ll only OK something like this if we give out a similar but not the same task before the interview so a person can train a bit beforehand.

I’ve heard it all justified as “we want to see how you perform under pressure” but to me that has always sounded super flimsy - like if this is representative of how work is done at this organisation, then do I want to work there in the first place? And if it isn’t, why the hell are you putting people through this ringer in the first place, just sounds inhumane.

Yea, there's really no way to do an "interview assignment" well.

If you give unlimited amount of time, you're giving an advantage to people with no life who can just focus on your assignment and polish it as if it were a full time job.

If you give a limited amount of time, then you're making the interview a pressure cooker with a countdown clock, giving a disadvantage to people who are just not great at working under minute-to-minute time pressure.

Depends on the purpose. If you treat it as a minimum bar to pass and are up front about and actually adhere to that then anyone spending more than the limit on it is presumably just wasting his own time (and to an extent the company's because the application process continues). It only becomes a problem if instead of an objective pass/fail metric you start gauging other details that would benefit from additional time spent.

> For every "20 min max" take home assignment, there will be people who are willing to spend 4+ hours doing it to outshine candidates who have jobs, families and lives.

I started refusing take-home tests a couple of decades ago, but when I did them, this is 100% what I would have done.

>For every "20 min max" take home assignment, there will be people who are willing to spend 4+ hours doing it to outshine candidates who have jobs, families and lives.

The ones we use have a clear scoring system and prepared inputs - all it matters is the generated output.

you can put a time limit on it from when they start to submit. It's really the only way to solve high volume of unqualified applicants. So much time wasted talking to people who could barely code

Submit 30min after interview, “you have 20min” (remainder for bio break or whatever)?

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