Comment by karaterobot
10 months ago
Those four companies he cites (Matter-App, Adcellerant, Symplicity, Bidsight) that tell you to spend x hours, then tell you "hey, but y'know, if you want to do [an open-ended number of additional hours for free], that'd be great!" should all go sit in the corner.
Realistically, people are going to spend more time on their take-home assignments, because they perceive there's an advantage to doing so. It's not hard to imagine how this spirals out of control over time, a feedback loop of candidates trying to do more and more free, meaningless work as the bar is raised. A three-hour assignment that takes an entire weekend, a three-hour assignment that takes a week, etc. But they shouldn't be openly encouraging this death spiral, they should be trying to keep it under control.
Better to say "if it looks like you spent 20 hours on a 3 hour assignment, we'll think of you as someone who isn't good at estimating, and wastes a lot of time fiddling with things that are out of scope".
This is what I don't care for, because it doesn't mirror the job at all. If it takes someone 20 hours to do a 3 hour project, that's a problem and it won't show up in the takehome.
It's almost the opposite of what the job actually entails. I rarely estimate that a project will take 3 hours and then I have 48 uninterrupted hours in which to accomplish it, no biggie if it takes more than 3. The job is typically the opposite, where I estimate it will take 3 hours and then I realized that I need to accomplish 40 hours of work in the 20 meeting-free work hours I have this week so I need to find a way to finish it in 90 minutes.