Ask HN: Good samples of take-home coding tests to give to candidates? - vinnyglennon
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sethammons
I recommend taking a problem you or someone on your team recently solved and
distill out any internal-specific parts of the problem. Expect a candidate to
take 3x the time it takes you to complete the assignment. If you want an
assignment that should take them around 2 hours, give yourself 40 minutes to
complete it. If you can't complete it in time, you need to cut the scope of
the problem.

This works really well for in-person technical questions (live coding or
design). I've vetted this over hundreds of candidates at this point.

It has been years since I've given a take-home assignment, but the same basic
rules apply.

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sergiotapia
At Papa, this is the take home assignment we used to scale our team.

[https://github.com/joinpapa/foobar-
takehome](https://github.com/joinpapa/foobar-takehome)

You may think, "it's trivial" and you would be right. But believe it or not a
ton of people couldn't complete it.

I think it's a good take home because it'll show you what the candidate values
when writing code. It's also respectful of the candidates time.

