
Ask HN: How many hours of interview “homework” is appropriate? - xexers
I just had a first interview with a company.  They have given me a coding assignment and bug bash assignment that would take a rockstar coder a minimum of 4 hours and for someone like me would take about 6-8 hours.  Is that absurd?  Should I be offended?
======
bgia
It's up to you. That doesn't feel absolutely absurd to me. If you work with
them, you're going to spend much more than 8 hours working... 8 hours is very
small to judge people, but it will give them an idea of how clean and careful
you can be. Companies like Automattic would start with a 4-8 hours assignment,
then if you do well, they would ask you to work part-time for them for 2
weeks. Some companies won't ask you anything except to code for one hour over
the phone...

------
kylecordes
I was a strong proponent of the "write some code for us" interview approach
for years. We used a variation, slightly unusual - we would pay interviewees
for some hours of work so they did not feel we were trying to get them to work
for free as an interview.

But looking back at the results over a period of years, some hires never
reached the level of quality/productivity they had shown in the interview
homework. I don't know why this is, one possibility is that some interviewees
"cheat" by getting someone else to do the project for them. I don't know if
that happened to us, but whatever did happen, the net result is that the
interview homework approach is not ultimately all that great.

Now we do something different. As part of the interview process, the
interviewee sets and codes with a couple of our developers for a couple of
hours. This has its own downsides (some otherwise excellent people have
trouble with the stress of being "in the hot seat"), but so far we're much
happier with it.

Also, spend a few hours trying to write code with someone, and you have a
pretty good sense of the oh-so-desired "cultural fit" without having to ever
actually look for such a vague thing.

------
arebop
It's not absurd, you shouldn't be offended, and only you can decide if you
want to invest 8 hours proving your fitness to this company.

