Comment by jcomis
10 months ago
These are/were rampant in product design hiring. Especially "startups" or smaller companies. The direction is always the same "spend max a couple hours!" but the understanding is clearly you must spend significantly more. Some are cute with clearly non work related problem, like a previous company I worked for that did "design an app for a time machine" or similar. But many are very very obviously current problems the company is facing.
In my last job search (~3 years ago) I was presented with many requests to complete a design challenge. I rejected them outright and the responses I got (typically from a 3rd party "design recruiter") were quite astounding. Some acknowledged and moved on, but there were several who clearly expressed frustration, disdain, sometimes almost anger. One dropped me from another role I was working with them on for refusing.
Now it's a total red flag for me. But judging from Blind posts it's still a common practice.
> The direction is always the same "spend max a couple hours!"
Interestingly, I always took restrictions on time seriously. When I was told I should spend max 3 hours, I stopped latest at 3 hours, often earlier and discussed shortcommings of the solution based on spent time in the interview.
That strategy is easier when you are not that interested in that particular job though.
Every job I tried this approach on were immediate rejections. Only solutions that completely fulfilled the requirements, with lots of testing, etc. were accepted for next steps. IE. I've never seen anyone who actually meant it when they gave a time limit.
> The direction is always the same "spend max a couple hours!" but the understanding is clearly you must spend significantly more.
I am in Product now, but when I was in SRE, I got one like this. "We don't want you to spend more than 3-4 hours on this", where "this" was:
Build a log parser for streaming Apache CLF. The parser should:
Keep a rolling monitor of the top 10 requests, displaying their velocity in req/sec as a rolling average.
Display aggregates of visitor counts over the last hour and day.
Have high watermark alerts when ingress traffic as a whole, or to hotspot URLs hit thresholds, and then be able to de-alert when traffic dropped.
Scaffolding to deploy same.
Unit tests and documentation for same.
Ability to ensure URLs were safe, stripped of any GET parameters.
Not overly complicated, but you're not busting that out in 3 hours in any polished manner, if at all.
Allo
I got a similar one once, like a fully working mocked banking system with currency exchange in 3 hours.
I just didn't proceed with the interview after that, if the staff can't manage to plan how long a test takes, there's no chance that they can plan anything accurately in the company either.