Comment by FireBeyond
10 months ago
> 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.