I love long takehomes. They're like pet projects, but with clearly defined goals and with people that might even give you a review if you're lucky. I always use them to try a new library or a framework, and often continue improving on them even after they're submitted and evaluated.
I had a take-home assignment to build a Dropbox competitor around 10 years ago, it was a pretty big project but I actually still use it for sharing files with friends because it's legitimately much easier to use than Dropbox.
> I had a take-home assignment to build a Dropbox competitor around 10 years ago, it was a pretty big project
I'm genuinely amused you thought (think?) it acceptable to do such work without payment. Here, any potential employer submitting such a request would be laughed at.
Well, technically if he isn't getting paid, it's his copyright, allowing him to use the code and even create a business around it, and the company has no rights to it- so in this case it worked out well for him.
But yes, its a pretty crappy idea that people should do 'real' work for free to get hired.
Sure, but at best that's unrelated to their value as an interview process. At worst, it's actually making things worse for you, because you're distracted and not doing more interviews.
Quality beats quantity. If you smash the hell out of a take-home project you won't need to do any more interviews. Companies that rely on take-homes usually are the same ones that don't make you go through Leetcode/trivia gauntlets.
My biggest advice is if they say to use 4 hours but you need 8 to do an amazingly thorough job then use 8. It's basically cheating but I've always found that it doesn't end up causing any actual problems in terms of being able to deliver at a velocity they needed in actual product work post-hire.
My biggest advice is to assume the reviewer is a bored junior running down a checklist that tests only what was in the spec. They have like five minutes budgeted for getting your project running and a pile of applications to go.
> Quality beats quantity. If you smash the hell out of a take-home project you won't need to do any more interviews.
This means a decent amount of that time spent on documentation, imho.
I do as you do, but there is a very real risk that nobody will ever look at it. Or it gets assigned to a dev (who has a lot of other real work to do) to look at and the give it a cursory once over and a thumbs up or down.
I had one where after weeks of work, tweaking, it received zero time on their eyeballs.
And I know because they never went to the link i sent. So ghosting a project is a very huge reality...
>If you smash the hell out of a take-home project you won't need to do any more interviews. Companies that rely on take-homes usually are the same ones that don't make you go through Leetcode/trivia gauntlets.
First job me believed that. Current job me has done 2 take homes that only lead to ghosts. then 1 more that lead to failing a leetcode style interview. Never again.
and I have plenty of personal projects outside of work, I don't need more pet projects like the one comment up stream.
I am happy that you are full of life and joy with programming. I genuinely want you to keep that, it is precious. However, they are getting free labour from you, so just keep that in mind.
For me, I can't do that anymore. I just can't muster up the energy to work on problems for something thats not going to be taken seriously by the "client"
