Ask HN: What are some of the best take-home coding tasks you've gotten?

9 points · n2d4 · 1 days ago

As an applicant, I've personally had a mixed experience with take-homes. We're designing the technical interviews right now, and I thought I'd ask for some stories on exciting take-home tasks. We're looking for something that resembles the actual job, so we'll allow any tool (including AI and debuggers).

Also curious to hear about any bad ones you've done.

32 comments

austin-cheney · 16 minutes ago

While I know there are some exceptionally few objective ethical companies out there I have completely lost faith in take home assignments. It’s one of those: that’s why we can’t have nice things.

If a potential employer wants to evaluate my ability and style for writing code I have a GitHub profile with numerous projects populated over numerous years. If that is too much trouble then why the fuck would I do a take home assignment for them?

JohnFen · 1 days ago

I never had a good one, although that's probably because I started refusing to do them years ago.

The worst one was about 15 years ago. The task was to design and implement an ML system to solve a complex network optimization problem. It was so complex that I was given three months to do it. My estimation was that I could do it in three months if I worked on it full time, which was clearly a ridiculous ask.

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aprdm · 1 days ago

I had one that I enjoyed many years ago, to write a service that calculated the Nth digit of Pi.

It was up to you what you wanted to do / how / if you wanted to deploy. They only asked that you write how you would've liked to receive such service from another org.

Then in the day of the in person interview we reviewed my code / README / tests ; was very nice.

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csomar · 1 days ago

Take-homes are highly flawed. If you provide a small/short challenge that could be solved with AI, it'll not help you measure the candidate. On the other hand, if you ask for a month worth of work, no one is going to take that up. Automattic does pay for it, and that's the only way I can see this attracting eligible candidates.

At your stage (startup with 2 people), you are much better focusing with designing your product than designing an interview process. Hire someone you know or freelancers.

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codingdave · 1 days ago

The best ones I have done have been actual paid tasks for the team. Where they found something they needed from their backlog that was small and self-contained enough that I could do on my own system without needing any complex onboarding, and they paid me market rate for the time worked. We then came back together and reviewed the work as the next interview.