#EngineeersTakehomeassignmentTakehometests

[premayogan]

Engineers' take-home

Engineering take-home tests are a controversial thing. While some employers swear by them, just as many engineers believe they are disrespectful, lazy, and flat out refuse to proceed with interviews that include them.

The truth is: Take-home interviews are awesome, but they're really easy for startups to get disastrously wrong. A good take-home offers several advantages over other testing methods:

It provides a more accurate work sample than whiteboard interviews or timed challenges. It removes the stress that unrealistically high-pressure tests—like timed challenges—induced. It creates easy benchmarks because every engineer should receive the same test. Unfortunately, hiring managers often give out take-home projects that take days to complete, have no relation to the work an engineer will be doing at the company, and stress a potential engineer more than an algorithmic interview would.

To create a take-home that engineers will actually complete, while still giving you a good measure of their abilities, there are three key principles to follow.

The Problem

Several weeks ago, we interviewed a recent college grad. He'd done well on our quiz, had great personal projects, and I was excited to talk to him. As soon as the interview started, however, I could tell that something was wrong. I gave him a programming problem, but he could not get started. He'd start to write one thing, mutter that it was a bad place to start and go back to something else. He switched languages. His breathing accelerated. He started to shake.

Pros:

Can work on it in your pajamas Usually given upwards of a week to work on an assignment Get to use your own editor and dev environment Can be a new addition to the portfolio Usually more fun than whiteboarding

Cons:

Level of difficulty can range drastically Much more effort and time-consuming than coding challenges Can be domain dependent Can lead to feature creep due to competition Doesn’t represent day to day work A lot of engineers prefer to take-home assignments. The timelines for turning them in are usually flexible, and candidates get to actually code. It’s no shock programmers prefer this to stand in front of a whiteboard while being silently judged. However, take-home tests have some major drawbacks. Firstly, they’re easy to manipulate. Many companies host their tests on GitHub. Type in “Challenge” or “Test” into GitHub search and you’ll find plenty. This will give the savvy candidate plenty of time to preemptively research the challenge. That’s not really a complaint. Just more of a pro-tip.

The issue is that it’s easy enough to find other people’s answers to these challenges and copy them? Plenty of engineers keep the answers to take home challenges on their GitHub profiles. You can even test it yourself. Type “ Challenge” into GitHub search and see what you find. I live next to the Etsy headquarters in Brooklyn and was curious if I could find the answers to some of their tests. “Etsy Challenge” revealed four. There were even more under “Etsy Test”. Read the full article