
Ask HN: How do you conduct take home coding exercises? - PopeDotNinja
What is your process?<p>Do you have a plan for reviewing getting results you&#x27;d like to see?<p>How much of what you ask a candidate to work on is well thought out?
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viraptor
I quite like tests which are really open ended. If you get too specific, you
can have 3 outcomes: they did it right, they did it wrong, you did it wrong.
It seems like only the last one can lead to an interesting discussion in most
cases. And if the problem is known, you may get a googled answer instead of
real work.

I've seen a few open tests work well, but the one I created was (DevOps
skills): Read rows from CSV, write them to database, print how many were
written (in any language) - treat it as production quality app and impress us.

You can learn so much about people's approach and experience from this. Do
they do documentation, do they handle non-us-ascii characters, do they handle
errors (and how), do they create package ready for deployment, do they care
about resource usage, and loads more.

The review was pretty much: are we impressed with the quality, thought put
into it. We tried to assign some points to specific things, but quite often
either we got impressed by something unexpected, or choice came down to the
subjective quality.

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quickben
Keep in mind that for some take-home is a very big no.

I mean, if I attend a full day of interviews on site, after 4-5 phone
interviews, asking me to code over the weekend after all that will just make
me wonder what's wrong with the company.

